The draw has been confirmed for Libema Open 's-Hertogenbosch, a first stop of the grass court season on the road to Wimbledon in Rosmalen, Netherlands. A joint tournament also with both ATP & WTA stars in action.
WTA draw wise, it has perhaps been impacted as has Nottingham which now takes place next week by Queen's now taking a pivotal slot on the calendar. Now it joins Berlin and Bad Homburg as the big WTA tournaments on grass.
This means that many of the big names that perhaps would've taken late wildcards into this event have not and others are playing in London. But as ever, it is also a field ruled by Russians with Liudmila Samsonova, the defending champion returning as top seed. She has dominated this event in recent years.
She defeated Bianca Andreescu last year in a dramatic finale. They could actually face in the Quarter-Finals. Samsonova has an open draw facing qualifiers until that point while Andreescu will face either Anouck Vrancken Peeters or Lulu Sun if she gets past a qualifier herself.
Andreescu took a late wildcard into Rosmalen after losing out to Nao Hibino shockingly in Roland Garros qualifying. Ekaterina Alexandrova is second seed as well.
She faces either Katerina Siniakova or Anna Blinkova. Then we get an all sibling tie as Veronika and Polina Kudermetova face off. The winner in this same section faces Danielle Collins or Greet Minnen.
Elise Mertens is third seed and faces Viktoriya Tomova. The winner then likely faces Maria Sakkari who has also received a late wildcard into this event.
Anastasia Potapova, Magda Linette and Xinyu Wang are also among the top seeds. Olga Danilovic intriguingly took a late wildcard last week but has since withdrawn so will not begin her grass court season next week after all.
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