TOKYO: Naomi Osaka will play the Billie Jean King Cup for the first time in four years when Japan face Kazakhstan in a qualifier in Tokyo next month, the team said Friday.
\nThe four-time Grand Slam winner and former world number one is making her return to tennis this season after giving birth, and last played at the tournament in 2020.
\nThe 26-year-old has played at five tournaments since making her comeback, and lost to Belgium\u2019s Elise Mertens in the last 32 at the Indian Wells Masters earlier this week.
\nShe is currently ranked 287 in the world after taking a 15-month break from the tour for maternity leave.
\nIt will be Osaka\u2019s first appearance in Tokyo since she withdrew from the Pan Pacific Open in September 2022 before her second-round match.
\nJapan will face Kazakhstan on April 12 and 13 at Tokyo\u2019s Ariake Coliseum, where Osaka reached the third round of the Tokyo Olympics in 2021.
\nThe winners will advance to November\u2019s finals in Spain.
\n\u201cShe said that she wants to play, so I\u2019m really happy,\u201d local media quoted Japan captain Ai Sugiyama as saying.
\nOsaka has previously said that she wants to play at this summer\u2019s Paris Olympics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
TOKYO: Naomi Osaka will play the Billie Jean King Cup for the first time in four years when Japan face Kazakhstan in a qualifier in Tokyo next month, the team said Friday. The four-time Grand Slam winner and former world number one is making her return to tennis this season after giving birth, and last …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":62035,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-62028","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62028","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62028"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62028\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62040,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62028\/revisions\/62040"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/62035"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}