São Paulo, 17 September 2026: Badosa's rebuild, a rare all-Armenian meeting and a 16-year-old carrying Brazil

The second round in São Paulo arrives with everyone slightly out of rhythm. Rain kept pushing matches across days, so several of these players finished their openers on Wednesday and now start again with barely a night in between. That sort of schedule tends to reward whoever kept things simple in the first round, and there were not many of those here.

There is a lot packed into one afternoon and evening: Paula Badosa trying to turn a good fortnight in New York into something steadier, two players still measuring their careers in months since an injury, an all-Armenian meeting that almost never happens at this level, and a 16-year-old from Brazil who has suddenly become the tournament's emotional centre. Here are the five I want to talk through:

15:00 — Elina Avanesyan — Alina Charaeva
15:30 — Suzan Lamens — Solana Sierra
16:00 — Nauhany Vitoria Leme Da Silva — Kaitlin Quevedo
17:30 — Jazmin Ortenzi — Paula Badosa
20:30 — Eva Lys — Nadia Podoroska

Times are UTC.

Elina Avanesyan — Alina Charaeva

Two players from the same small tennis programme, both 24, separated by twenty-two places in the ranking — Charaeva at 133, Avanesyan at 155 — and by very different recent journeys. Avanesyan lost most of a career to mononucleosis and a shoulder that stopped her serving properly, and she has spent this season stacking up matches again, mostly on clay, where her 26-11 record has done the rebuilding work. "I can see improvements in my game, but I try to take it day by day," she said of the comeback (Punto de Break). That is the tone of a player who has learned not to promise anything.

They have met once, in March at the Antalya ITF, and Charaeva won it 6-4 6-1 on clay — comfortably enough that it cannot simply be waved away. But the São Paulo hard court is a different room, and the first round pointed in Avanesyan's favour. She handled Julia Riera 6-2 6-4 with some loose service games and a lot of depth; Charaeva needed three sets and two calendar days to get past Xiaodi You 3-6 7-6(5) 6-3, a match she was losing before she found her nerve. Charaeva's hard-court year has been modest at 4-6, though indoors she has been excellent, so the surface is not hostile to her, just less familiar than the clay she grew up winning on.

I lean to Avanesyan, and the recovery gap is most of the reason: she has fresher legs and a game built to drag Charaeva into one extra ball. The 1.71 on her looks about right rather than generous, and with both of them capable of long, cross-court stalemates I would not be surprised if this drifts past the 21.5 games total. The −2 handicap is the part I would hesitate over; Charaeva competes too stubbornly for a tidy scoreline.

Suzan Lamens — Solana Sierra

This is the match on the card where reputation and current form pull hardest against each other. Sierra is the higher-ranked player at 90 and has a 3-1 record at this tournament, but her hard-court season reads 7-15, and the run into São Paulo was grim: 1-6 2-6 against Elina Svitolina, 1-6 1-6 against Aoi Ito, losses to Sloane Stephens and Tatiana Prozorova. Then she beat Cadence Brace 6-4 3-6 6-1, wandered through the middle of the match and finished the decider like someone who remembered what she does well. Sierra has said before that quicker conditions suit her: "I like to play fast, and that benefits me" (Punto de Break), and São Paulo's mild altitude fits that preference.

Lamens, meanwhile, has had a miserable year on outdoor hard, 1-9 before this week, which makes her escape against Carolina Meligeni Alves all the stranger and all the more valuable. Meligeni served for the match twice and lost it 3-6 7-6(2) 6-2, undone by a tie-break that worked as an emotional reset and by Lamens simply refusing to hand over short balls once she was ahead. Nurein Ahmed's argument in the previews is the one I find persuasive: Lamens can hurt Sierra by keeping the ball deep and neutral, leaving the Argentine to manufacture her own pace, which is exactly when she starts pressing.

They have never played, and I genuinely do not know which version of either shows up. Lamens spent far more energy on Wednesday and has the earlier start; Sierra finished her match in the better mood. If it turns into another two-hour test of patience, the woman who just survived one has the fresher proof that she can. The market's 1.76 on Sierra feels a touch short to me, and +1.5 on Lamens is the side of the handicap I find more defensible — but this one could tip either way on a couple of loose games.

Nauhany Vitoria Leme Da Silva — Kaitlin Quevedo

Naná Leme Da Silva is 16, ranked outside the top 600, and she is the only Brazilian left in the singles, which in São Paulo counts for more than any number. Her first round was not clean tennis — she failed to close the opening set, gave away an advantage in the second, twice trailed by a break in the decider — and it ended 5-7 6-4 7-5 over Astra Sharma anyway, because she stopped hurrying. "I had to fight for every point," she said afterwards (Tênis Brasil). That came on top of a US Open junior quarterfinal that also went the distance, so the tank is not full.

Quevedo, 20 and ranked 105, had the opposite Wednesday: 6-0 6-2 over Anastasia Tikhonova, done and dusted, no scoreboard pressure at all. Her Barranquilla week was the more instructive one — a 5-7 7-5 6-1 grind past Sara Sorribes Tormo, then a 5-7 1-6 defeat to Claire Liu in which she was rushed and contained. She also has inside information: "I practised with her on Saturday, so I already know a little about how she plays," Naná admitted about their session, which cuts both ways. The Spaniard should know exactly when the teenager is forcing.

Quevedo at 1.178 looks like the safest reading of the day: fresher, more used to tour-level pace, and unlikely to be talked out of her plan by a crowd. What I am less sure about is the margin. Naná hits heavily and the central court will be loud, so +5.5 games for the Brazilian strikes me as fair value on a match where one wobbly Quevedo service game changes the whole shape.

Jazmin Ortenzi — Paula Badosa

Badosa is the name that sells this section of the draw, and her opener was exactly what she needed rather than anything memorable: 6-3 6-2 over Justina Mikulskyte, assertive at the start, briefly scratchy on serve, then settled. "I'm satisfied with the level I played at… I felt quite comfortable," she said (Tênis Brasil), which after a week of rain and almost no outdoor practice is a modest claim honestly made. The better evidence is from New York: 6-1 6-4 against Daria Kasatkina, then 4-6 6-7(5) against Coco Gauff, a defeat in which her ball-striking looked like the old Badosa. She manages a chronic back problem and has had hip and shoulder trouble, and she talks about that history without self-pity: "I identify as someone who rises again from difficult moments" (Tênis Brasil).

Ortenzi did her own job well — 6-3 6-2 over Chloe Paquet, dictating with the forehand often enough that the match never became a defensive examination — and then went back out for doubles. That is the problem. Badosa played once and briefly; the Argentine played twice, and her hard-court season of 1-4 suggests this is not the surface where she wants to be running uphill. Ortenzi's only real route is variation: change height, refuse to give Badosa a rhythm, and test her movement before she plants her feet. Flat power against flat power is a match she cannot win.

Badosa at 1.048 is priced as a formality, and I think she wins it comfortably, though not quite as brutally as −7 games implies. My expectation is something in the 6-3 6-2 neighbourhood with one nervous Badosa service game early, before she adjusts to an opponent she has never faced — which nudges me toward the over on 17.5 rather than the handicap.

Eva Lys — Nadia Podoroska

The best story of the evening, and the one where the rankings lie most. Lys sits at 99, Podoroska at 317, and yet the Argentine has won 14 of 17 hard-court matches this year while Lys has won three of ten. That gap is not a mystery. Lys is managing spondyloarthritis, a chronic inflammatory condition that shapes how much she can train and play, and her first round showed a player short of belief: 6-1 up in tempo against Gabriela Cé, then passive as the Brazilian changed rhythm, and finally 6-1 5-7 7-5 after rain split the match across two days. "I struggled and was very nervous, but I'm very happy to have won," she said (Tênis Brasil). Survival mattered more than the tennis.

Podoroska's opener was the cleaner piece of work, 6-3 6-4 over Lucrezia Stefanini without a physical epic — which for her is the point. She came back from hip and shoulder injuries and then forearm-tendon inflammation, and her own yardstick is blunt: "The most positive thing is having played so many matches and finishing healthy" (ITF). In New York she was nearly out against Ena Koike and won 3-6 6-3 6-2; against Anna Blinkova the ceiling showed. Their one previous meeting was a rout, Lys 6-3 6-0 on clay in Budapest in July 2024, but that was a different Lys, playing with confidence she has spent this season looking for.

The key, to my eye, is simple: if Lys steps inside the baseline and takes the ball early, she has the better hands and the better redirection, and Podoroska never gets to organise a point. If she retreats and waits for errors, this becomes a long night and Podoroska's hard-court year stops looking like an accident. I find 1.44 on Lys slightly optimistic given how she closed on Wednesday, and −3.5 games harder still to trust. A decider would not shock me at all, and the 20.5 total feels beatable if the match goes where I suspect it goes.

A teenager, a comeback and Badosa's next step

The day's real questions are about bodies and nerve rather than ranking. Can Naná Leme Da Silva turn Wednesday's escape into freedom instead of an emotional hangover? Does Lys trust her attacking instincts when the closing moments arrive again? And is Badosa's New York form something she can produce on an ordinary Thursday in São Paulo, which is the only test that matters for a comeback? The all-Armenian meeting between Avanesyan and Charaeva is the quiet one, and probably the most interesting for anyone who likes watching two players who know each other too well.

I would give Lamens against Sierra the closest look if forced to choose one, because it is the match where the pricing and the form sheet disagree most sharply. The specific numbers on all five belong to the AI cappers, who lay them out match by match on the match pages — that is where the picks get concrete, and mine stay as they are: opinions waiting to be corrected by the tennis.