Fresh off her dumping from the Adelaide International, Ash Barty succumbs to leg injury

Fresh off her dumping from the Adelaide International, Ash Barty has succumbed to a leg injury and isn’t sure when she may play again.

February has not been a kind month to Ash Barty. And it keeps on getting worse.

Just hours after she crashed out of the Adelaide International, an ongoing injury forced the world number one to withdraw from next week’s Qatar Open.

Barty, who was defending the WTA 500 title, played her Wednesday night match against Danielle Collins with a heavily strapped left thigh as she had done for much of the Australian Open this month.

The Queenslander has pencilled in a return to playing in Miami next month, but that remains up in the air.

“Unfortunately, I have withdrawn from the Qatar Total Open with a left leg injury. I wish the tournament a safe and successful event and hope to play there next year,” she said.

“We will sit down like we always do at the end of a match after a tournament and look at what is next.

“I will have that discussion with my team in the next day or so to work out as best we can what we will do moving forward.

“Obviously it’s an ever-changing world that we’re living in now, things can change quite dramatically quite quickly.”

@ashbarty withdraws from #Qatar Total Open due to leg #injury‼️https://t.co/G3fd0CpjOD@WTA@QatarTennis#Tennis

— TennisNews365 (@Tennis_News_365) February 25, 2021

The 6-3, 6-4 win for the player sitting at 37 in the world rankings was merited, Barty failing to match the aggression of the American who had lost all their previous three meetings

Barty looked forlorn as she left Memorial Drive but claimed she “was physically fine” and trotted out the line that there are no easy matches going into any tournament.

But hype appears to be taking its toll on the popular and ever polite Queenslander, who also fell to Karolina Muchova in a shock loss at the Australian Open last week.

“From an expectation public point of view, I think that’s their views and that’s their opinions and they’re 100 per cent able to voice those,” she said,

“But from a playing perspective, it‘s about what do we expect of us as players in what do we bring to the court each day? We bring the right professionalism, we prepare the right way and then the result is ... it just is what it is.

“It’s not always going to go your way, you can’t win every single tennis match, but you can sure as hell approach it the right way. And I think for my team and for me, we did that this week, and we just didn’t quite get that result that went our way.”

World number three Simona Halep has also pulled out of the Qatar Open.