Marta Kostyuk – Ashlyn Kruger. Forecast and announcement for the WTA 500 match in Adelaide

On January 7, the first racket of Ukraine Marta Kostyuk (WTA 18) will begin the WTA 500 hardcourt tournament in Adelaide, Australia.

In the round of 16, the Ukrainian will play against Ashlyn Kruger (USA, WTA 54). The estimated time of the start of the meeting is 06:00 Kyiv time.

Sport.ua will conduct a video broadcast of the match.

Marta Kostyuk

Our women’s tennis leader disappointed in Brisbane and received a well-deserved dose of criticism from the fans. Fans, in particular, criticized the Ukrainian for spending too much time on Instagram. This is partially true, but maybe you noticed that in front of Adelaide, she has 0 posts and 0 comments? 🙂

Perhaps with a cooler head will suit this five-hundred-year-old. Especially since she will have to defend last year’s quarterfinal on these courts. But the grid is not the most favorable: 54th racket Kruger, 12th racket Bados, 7th racket and 1st seed Jessica Pegula.

However, Marta is quite capable of beating each of them, and it seems like it’s about time if she, like all of Ukraine, sees herself in the top 10 already in 2025. And such an authoritative portal as Tennis Abstract believes that Marta is the fourth (after three representatives of the swamps) tennis player with the greatest prospects of entering the top ten.

Well, if we have already talked about numbers and hopes, then it is worth looking at the failure in the game with Yuan Yue, which was then calmly overcome by Angelina Kalinin, and this week the thorough Camila Osorio already managed the Chinese on the hard courts of Hobart. In the match against Yuan Yue, Marta had a terrible serve, and 8 double faults and 36% of the points won on the second serve was the icing on the cake. And with reception, things did not go well – 25% of the points won from the first serve and only 48% from the second serve. Hence the unsuccessful result – 4:6, 3:6.

We can draw conclusions – Marta did not prepare for the start of the season as she wanted. It is unlikely that the match with Yuan Yue was just a bad day, because before that Kostyuk did not look very good in a pair with Ostapenko. We hope that Kostyuk will have time to recover and draw conclusions about her mistakes before Adelaide, because we want to see a strong week before the start of the Australian Open.

Getty Images/Global Images Ukraine. Marta Kostyuk Ashlyn Kruger

The American woman started 2022 outside the top 500. She finished in the top 200 that season. And in 2023 it rose to the 80th place and in 2024 it finally approached the top 50. Here’s what kind of progressive tennis player Marty has to play with.

Kruger does not grab the stars from the sky and moves relatively slowly, but quite confidently. Last season, she reached the 1/16 finals of the US Open, and this is her best result at a Grand Slam so far. She finished 2024 with 28 wins and 26 losses.

And already in the new season, for the first time in her career, she reached the quarterfinals of the WTA series tournament. In Brisbane, she failed to reach the 1/2 finals, losing to Polina Kudermetova. In Adelaide, Kruger began her performances in the qualification, where she first beat Ayla Tomlyanovych, and then lost to Kateryna Siniakova. Ashlyn got into the base as a lucky loser.

In the last 9 days, Kruger played 6 matches in two different cities in Australia and won four of them. I doubt the good physical shape of the 20-year-old American woman, but on January 6 she was resting.

Kruger tries to play well from the serve due to his height (not very much, but 1 meter 85 cm is there). However, this often leads to a good number of double mistakes. For example, in the lost match with Kateryna the day before, she executed a double 9 times.

Getty Images/Global Images Ukraine. Ashlyn Kruger Prediction for the match Marta Kostyuk – Ashlyn Kruger

Previously, the girls did not play among themselves, so there is nothing to rely on when choosing a bet. But I want to believe in the more experienced and, quite possibly, more motivated Marta – Kostyuk’s victory + total games more than 17.5 for 2.11.