Next week will be full of action on grass with two last WTA events preceeding the Wimbledon Championships and the qualifying to main draw of the Grand Slam in UK. WTA 250 event in Germany's Bad Homburg is the lowest range WTA tournament this week, but it hosts a really great field of players, who want to take the last chance of getting points and match practice ahead of the upcoming Grand Slam.
Iga Swiatek is an absolute headline of the main draw in Bad Homburg. The world's ranking leader has choosen this event a long time ago as the only one, which will help her to accomodate into grass surface conditions ahead of Wimbledon. Grass is publicly known as the least favorite surface of Swiatek, but the Pole is still considered in the range of favorites before Wimbledon and all the spotlights in Bad Homburg will be pointed at her performance, especially that the event's location is really close to Poland.
Swiatek gets quite a tricky draw in the opening round, as she plays Tatjana Maria. The home representative performs really well on grass, as she has approached the semifinals in the last year's edition of Wimbledon. Maria has also a good experience on this surface recently, as she won 6 matches so far, including this week's challenger in Italy's Gaiba, where she still competes this weekend, advancing into semifinals as a top seed. The winner of the clash between Swiatek and Maria will play against one of the qualifiers in second round.
The top quarter of a draw delivers also two other interesting matches in first round. Alycia Parks plays Leylah Fernandez, while the other home crowd's favorite Sabine Lisicki plays against Lin Zhu, who reached out the semifinals in WTA 250 Rothesay Open in Birmingham.
Liudmila Samsonova is the second top seed in Bad Homburg. The world's number 15 got paired up against Viktoriya Tomova in first round. Donna Vekic is seeded with 3rd and can be considered as a favorite of the bottom half, as the Croatian showed up really well in WTA 500 Berlin this week, moving up into semifinals and defeating the reigning Wimbledon champion Elena Rybakina on the road. Vekic sets up an interesting pairing against Emma Navarro, who advanced into final of WTA challenger in Ilkley this week.
