US Open 2026 pages
Sports · US Open 2026 · Women's Singles · Round of 32
Sorana Cirstea vs 
Jasmine Paolini
Round of 32
Watch: ESPN · ESPN2 · ABC · ESPN app
My pick: Sorana Cirstea to advance · locked 2026-09-02 18:05 UTCPrediction
Cîrstea, but only just, and against a head-to-head that says the opposite. Paolini has beaten her three times out of three — on clay at Roland Garros in 2023, on hard courts at Portorož in 2021 and in the Dubai semi-finals in February 2024 — and none of those was a blowout. What has changed is the year each of them is having. Cîrstea is 36, ranked 17th and seeded 16th, 37-15 for the season, and has spent 3 hours 5 minutes reaching the third round: 6-3 6-0 over Julia Grabher, then 6-2 7-5 over Diane Parry, a match she nearly gave back after serving for it at 5-4. Paolini is 30, ranked 21st, 17-14, and arrived in New York without a single hard-court match this summer after a left-foot problem cost her Toronto and Cincinnati; she needed three sets to get past Veronika Erjavec and looked better in beating Lucrezia Stefanini 6-4 6-1. The Italian is the more complete mover and takes the ball earlier. The Romanian is playing the better tennis of the two right now and is 261-232 on hard courts for a career that, by her own country's press, ends in December.
The case for Sorana Cirstea
57% to winCîrstea has had the better season by any measure — 37-15 against 17-14, No. 17 against No. 21 — and is the seeded player. She reached the quarter-finals here in 2023 and beat Grabher for the loss of three games; against Parry she was outhit 30 winners to 22 and won anyway, which is the mark of someone whose match management is better than her ball-striking. Paolini has played two hard-court matches in three months, and a 36-year-old in her last season on tour has every reason to spend everything she has left in New York.
The case for Jasmine Paolini
43% to winPaolini has never lost to Cîrstea — three meetings, three surfaces, three wins, the last of them a Dubai semi-final. She is the quicker of the two by a distance and takes the ball inside the baseline, which is the pattern that has beaten Cîrstea every time they have played. She also looked substantially better in the second round than the first: twenty-one winners to ten, six of nine break points, and a second set that took twenty-nine minutes after a first she started by being broken to love. If the foot holds, the summer off is rest rather than rust.
Both cases written 2026-09-02, before the first ball — frozen into the record exactly as written, whatever the result. The percentages are mine — opinions with a percent sign on. They add to 100 because tennis has no draw to hide the rounding in.
Tale of the tape
Sorana CirsteaJasmine PaoliniPlayer vitals: US Open official player feed (usopen.org) and Tennis Abstract career match logs · as of 2026-09-02.
Career head-to-head: Tennis Abstract career match logs (tour-level) · as of 2026-09-02.
The briefing
Storylines
- Paolini leads 3-0, but they have not met since the Dubai semi-finals in February 2024.
- Paolini came to New York without a hard-court match all summer: a left-foot problem cost her Toronto and Cincinnati, and this is her first tournament since Wimbledon.
- Cîrstea, 36, is 37-15 for the season and reached the quarter-finals here in 2023; the Romanian press reports she will retire at the end of the year.
- Cîrstea served for the second round at 5-4 against Diane Parry, was broken, and broke straight back to win 7-5; Parry hit thirty winners to her twenty-two.
- Paolini beat Lucrezia Stefanini in an all-Tuscan derby, 6-4 6-1, after being broken to love in the opening game.
Head to head
Paolini leads 3-0: 6-4 4-6 6-1 in the Portorož quarter-finals in 2021, 7-5 2-6 6-2 in the Roland Garros first round in 2023, and 6-2 7-6(6) in the Dubai semi-finals in February 2024.
Source: Tennis Abstract career match logs (tour-level) · as of 2026-09-02.
Watch: Third-round coverage runs across ESPN, ESPN2 and ABC, with ESPN Deportes in Spanish — and every court streams in the ESPN app, which is where a match away from the two show courts will live. (ESPN press-room release and listings, as of 2026-08-27)
Court & schedule: Not yet assigned. The US Open posts each day's order of play the evening before, and this match has not reached the board yet. (Official US Open order-of-play release cadence, as of 2026-09-02)
Weather: Wednesday is the break in the weather the schedule has been waiting for: mostly cloudy, near 75°F, and a shower chance of only 19% until the light goes. The night session is where it turns — showers and thunderstorms at 69% on a low near 71°F. Thursday is the unsettled day, warm at 82°F with showers and thunderstorms likely at 60%, easing to 52% overnight. Then Friday breaks clean: near 82°F and mostly sunny on 8%, the first dry day of the fortnight, with Saturday sunny at 78°F. Ashe and Armstrong close their roofs and play on; everything else waits. (National Weather Service New York forecast, as of 2026-09-02)
Venue: USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, Flushing Meadows, New York — hard.
At this Stage
The Round of 32 is the third round, and the last one before a Grand Slam draw becomes a small tournament: sixteen women's matches across Friday and Saturday leave sixteen players standing, every one of them having won twice on these courts. This is the round where the seeding chart stops doing any work — from here on, whoever is left is who you play.
