US Open 2026 pages
Sports · US Open 2026 · Women's Singles · Round of 32
Sorana Cirstea vs Jasmine Paolini — 6-3 6-3
 Sorana Cirstea✓ | 6 | 6 |
 Jasmine Paolini | 3 | 3 |
Final · Friday, September 4, 2026 · Round of 32
Result
Paolini broke for 2-0, then served at 40-15 for 3-0 and lost the game, and the match turned there. Cîrstea won ten straight points around that break, took four games in a row, and closed the set by breaking Paolini to love. The second followed the same shape: Paolini broke for 2-1 and led 3-1, then lost a chaotic sixth game — six break points, a running argument with Sara Errani in her box — and the last five games with it. She had shouted to her box that she could not move, and afterwards said so herself: she had not felt her best physically and had known it, which was why she had been "a bit negative". The team had worked in New York on the movement, and on the trust in her own body that four weeks without touching a racket had cost her. Cîrstea served out from 5-3 on her fourth match point, with seven aces to one and sixteen unforced errors to Paolini's 25. At 36, in her nineteenth US Open, she reaches the fourth round here for only the second time, and will rise to a career-high No. 15 in a season she had announced as her last. "Deciding to retire has made me play better," she said. "It freed me." Italy has no woman left in the draw.
Sorana CirsteaRows the source hadn’t published are left off rather than guessed.
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.
Round of 64
Round of 32
What we know now
Court: Stadium 17
Match length: 1:15
Watch: ESPN · ESPN2 · ABC · ESPN app
What I said beforehand
The preview, frozen before the first serve. Clearly dated, never rewritten — that's the deal that makes the pick worth anything.
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.
My locked pick: Sorana Cirstea to advance ✓ RIGHT
“The head-to-head is 3-0 the other way and two years old; the season records, the seeding and the fact that Paolini has played two hard-court matches in three months are not.”
Locked 2026-09-02 18:05 UTC — rendered verbatim from the pick ledger; never a fresher, hedged version
Tale of the tape
Sorana CirsteaJasmine PaoliniPlayer vitals: US Open official player feed (usopen.org) and Tennis Abstract career match logs · as of 2026-09-04.
Career head-to-head: Tennis Abstract career match logs (tour-level) · as of 2026-09-02.
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.
Court & schedule: Stadium 17, Friday 4 September. The US Open posts each day's order of play the evening before; this one is on the board. (Official US Open order of play, as of 2026-09-03)
Weather: Sunday — the men's final, and the last match of the fortnight — is 78°F with showers and thunderstorms 95% likely, the wettest day of the two weeks and the one day that cannot be pushed back. Ashe closes its roof and plays on. It clears overnight: 20% Sunday night, 20% Monday, then dry and sunny from Tuesday. (National Weather Service New York forecast, as of 2026-09-13)
Venue: USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, Flushing Meadows, New York — hard.