A video captured at the National Tennis Centre in 2011 shows a pair of nine-year-old girls contesting the sort of rally that most amateur hackers could only dream of playing.
Lasting 19 shots in all, it ends when the pixie in white – who happens to be the young Emma Raducanu – hits a forehand cross-court approach, only for her yellow-shirted opponent to pass her brilliantly down the line.
That girl in yellow was Sonay Kartal. Until recently, she was known as the sort of honest striver who chips away at the fringes of the WTA Tour.
This week, though, Kartal has blossomed in the Californian desert. Three wins at Indian Wells – including the career-best scalp of world No 17 Beatriz Haddad Maia – have brought her to the fringes of the world’s top 60.
Now 23, Kartal needs only 15 points – the reward for a first-round win at a smaller WTA event – to overtake Raducanu and create tennis’s answer to the fable of the hare and the tortoise.
Even without the rivalry narrative, Kartal’s story has thrown up plenty of incident in the last year. Last season began with her going “in and out of hospital”, on account of an illness that she prefers not to specify. It was a dark time, with potentially serious consequences for her sporting career.
We don’t know exactly what happened, but we do know that Kartal got fit and healthy again, and was soon rebounding superbly on the court.
Starting from a ranking of around 300 in early April, she won back-to-back ITF titles in Nottingham and the small Spanish city of Monzon, then clocked her first top-50 win against Sorana Cirstea at Wimbledon.
As Kartal explained on Monday night, after overcoming Polina Kudermetova to reach the fourth round of Indian Wells, “Being sidelined and watching events go on without you is tough. It gives you time to reflect, and it makes you realise how much you really do love playing and how much it is your life.
“Last year, I was super grateful to even be on the court, let alone to have the biggest wins in my career. I think I played with a lot of freedom. And I think that, ultimately, that has helped me put myself in the position that I’m in right now.”
If we take the story back further, Kartal’s father is a Roger Federer fan who owned two Turkish restaurants in her home town of Brighton. And it was through a Lawn Tennis Association coach, who came in to enjoy a Turkish meal, that the Kartal children happened to be invited to a coaching session.
Kartal says herself that “I wasn’t the best junior”. Standing only 5ft 4in tall, in a sport that rewards wingspan, didn’t help. And she admits that she can be prone to playing a little safe. She has a tattoo on her wrist, a symbol of bravery, that she looks at when she needs inspiration.
Nuggety performer with obstinate defence
Even now, Kartal’s style of play is to make a lot of balls, using a heavily top-spun forehand to wear down her opponents. That has worked superbly in Indian Wells, where the courts reward high spin-rates by making the ball jump up high. Monday night’s match found her outlasting Kudermetova, who made a dominant start but eventually broke down in the face of Kartal’s obstinate defence.
You only have to look at Kartal to see that she is going to be nuggety. She may be short in stature but her muscles are eye-catching. Back in Brighton, she became a fitness nut during the Covid lockdown, pumping weights and going for long runs along the South Downs. She has said that gym work used to feel “like a chore… now I absolutely love it and it’s so good for my mental health.”
On Wednesday, Kartal could become the first British woman ever to reach the quarter-finals of Indian Wells – the self-styled “Tennis Paradise” which is unofficially known as “the fifth slam”.
This is rather a long shot, however. Her next opponent, world No1 Aryna Sabalenka, looked in ominous form in the third round as she demolished Italy’s Lucia Bronzetti for the loss of just three games.
“I’m getting used to playing on the bigger stadiums and with a bigger crowd,” said Kartel, who faced Coco Gauff on No1 Court in the third round of last year’s Wimbledon. “Whatever the outcome is, I’m going to learn a lot from that match, and I think in the future it will help my game out a lot. I’m going to go into it with no expectations and just continue to play the game style that I have been this week.”
