Eva Lys hit the ball again at the Billie Jean King Cup 2025. Lys lost her singles number against Türkiye and thus marked the defeat.
Source: Imago/Hasenkopf
Big disappointment instead of success at home: The German faces relegation after an unexpected defeat in the Billie Jean King Cup. In the playoff round, the DTB selection lost 1-2 against a foreign team from Türkiye. If the Bosporus team also wins against Belgium on Saturday, then the German players around Eva Lys and Ella Seidel will no longer be present in the most important team event of 2026.
Seidel started strong with a confident 6:1, 6:1 against Berfu Cengiz. But then Germany’s top player Lys surprisingly lost 2:6, 6:4, 0:6 against Zeynep Sonmez. In the deciding doubles, Anna-Lena Friedsam/Jule Niemeier ultimately lost to Sonmez/Ayla Aksu 6:2, 2:6, 4:6.
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A day of tennis at the quiet TC Ismaning facility started well: Seidel, just 20 years old, celebrated her first match in the Billie Jean King Cup after just 57 minutes.
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Then came the disappointment: Lys (23) could not overcome Sonmez’s strong performance and surrendered eight of her twelve service games. He fought through the second set – but in the decider he received the maximum penalty with a score of 0:6 after two hours. Sonmez is ranked 113th in the world, 73 places behind Lys. But she did write a bit of tennis fairy tale at Wimbledon this year when she became the first Turkish woman in the Open Era to reach the third round of a Grand Slam.
If Belgium loses, Germany will be relegated
And in the doubles, where top player Laura Siegemund was sorely missed due to a short-term back injury, things got worse: Friedsam and Niemeier were unable to maintain their dominance from the first set and lost.
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Now Germany must hope for a Belgian win against Türkiye on Saturday. If this happens, then they still have a chance of avoiding relegation with a win of their own over Belgium on Sunday.
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Source: dpa
