- Pair’s first-round match rescheduled for Tuesday 16 August
- Upset fans had bought tickets to see Williams before retirement
The highly anticipated first-round match between Serena Williams and Emma Raducanu at the Western & Southern Open in Cincinnati was abruptly postponed from Monday to Tuesday, frustrating fans who had spent considerable money and travelled to the event to watch the match.
Cincinnati is likely to be the penultimate tournament of Williams’s career after she announced last week that her retirement is imminent. It will also be Williams’s first match on home soil in two years and, with expectations so high, the tournament had announced in advance that Williams and Raducanu would headline the Monday night session.