Diane Parry beat Clara Tauson 6-3, 6-4 in the first round of the Berlin Open on Tuesday afternoon, and the loss stretched the Dane’s run of first-round defeats to seven straight. Clara Tauson has now gone 102 days without a singles win, a slump that has pulled her from 16th in the world at the start of March to 23rd.
Parry breaks through in Berlin
Parry, ranked 60th, broke Tauson once in each set and handled the key moments better after the match leveled at 2-2 in the opener. Tauson held on through those first four games before her service games started to loosen, and Parry broke again to move ahead 4-2 before serving out the set.
The second set followed a similar pattern. Tauson held serve to open it and created several break points, but Parry steadied at 3-3, broke again, and then closed the match on her second match point. The scoreline left no room for a recovery and ended Tauson’s Berlin run at the first hurdle.
Tauson’s long slide
The defeat fit a bigger pattern that has been building since 6 March, when Tauson beat Yulia Putintseva in the round of 64 at the Indian Wells Open. That remains her last singles victory. Since then, she has played seven matches, lost five, and twice failed to finish because of injuries.
Seven straight first-round defeats is the sharper number. It means Berlin was not an isolated miss, but the latest stop in a stretch that has kept her from building momentum during the middle of the season.
Bad Homburg awaits Tauson
Berlin was Tauson’s penultimate warm-up tournament before Wimbledon, which leaves her with one last chance next week at the WTA event in Bad Homburg, Germany. For Tauson, that is the immediate task now: find one win before the grass-court build-up ends and the main draw at Wimbledon arrives.
Parry leaves Berlin with a first-round win over a player still searching for the form that carried her to 16th in the rankings in March. Tauson leaves with another early exit, another loss on grass, and another result that deepens the pressure on the short stretch left before Wimbledon.
