WITH all the ATP Tour and WTA Tour tournaments on hiatus for the time being, Draft Central will take a look at various nations across the globe and analyse how the top players from that nation are performing. Our next nation is Luxembourg.

Top ATP player: Nil.

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Top WTA player: Mandy Minella
Rank: 147 (as of 23/03/2020)
Age: 34
Points: 428
Tournaments played: 28

One of only two Luxembourg players on either the ATP or WTA tours, Mandy Minella is coming to the end of her career, while Eleonora Molinaro‘s is just beginning. They are 15 years apart with the 34-year-old ranked inside the top 150, some 88 spots ahead of her 19-year-old compatriot. She has been a more than capable doubles player over the journey too, with Minella winning two doubles titles and a couple of 125K events on in the singles and one in the doubles.

In terms of Grand Slams, her best effort was reaching the third round back in 2010 and 2012 at the US Open, having not survived a first round match at the other tournaments until the Australian Open in 2014. She has won just the eight main draw matches from 20 attempts once reaching the Round of 128, which shows she has always been around that 60-100 rank, something she has maintained at her best throughout the past decade, though has only finished inside the top 100 at year’s end once (75th in 2012). Her career high rank is 66th in that same year, and now in the twilight of her career, that will probably hold until her retirement.

Most recently, she lost in the opening round at Lyon, going down in straight sets to Oceane Dodin, and in her only other non ITF Tour event this year, bowed out to former top 20 player, Johanna Larsson in the second round of qualifying at Melbourne Park. Her luck in first round matches at Grand Slams when making the main draw has been poor, copping Kiki Bertens and Belinda Bencic at Wimbledon and the US Open last year. Her best win in 2019 came at Roland Garros when she defeated 44th ranked Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova of Russia in straight sets, before going down to 12th seed Latvian, Anastasija Sevastova.

Other notable Luxembourg WTA players: Eleonora Molinaro (#235)

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Summary:

Minella will always be competitive in tournaments and can throw up the odd surprise result, though at 34-years-old, expect her to potentially focus on doubles more, where she is ranked just outside the top 100.