Saturday turned out to be a day of mixed fortunes for the Indian players in action at the Internazionali BNL d’Italia in Rome as Sania Mirza and Martina Hingis reached the women’s doubles final with a 6-3, 6-4 win while Rohan Bopanna and Florin Mergea lost their men’s doubles semi-final.
This is the third consecutive claycourt final for Hingis and Mirza this season. They earlier lost in the Stuttgart and the Madrid summit clashes to the French combine of Kristina Mladenovic and Caroline Garcia, whose winning run ended in the quarter-finals of Rome this week.
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This is also the second straight final at the Italian capital for the Indo-Swiss duo after ending up as the runner-up last year.
Hingis-Mirza survived a break-fest
It wasn’t an easy outing by any means for the top seeds against the unseeded Romanian pair of Irina-Camelia Begu and Monica Niculescu. Hingis and Mirza combined for a total of six doubles faults and were broken five times.
But they were sharp on their returns which helped them immensely. They broke their opponents seven times for the win in 1 hour 18 minutes.
In Sunday’s final, they will meet familiar rivals Ekaterina Makarova and Elena Vesnina, whom they famously defeated at the 2015 Wimbledon final in a stunning comeback.
Tight two-setter loss for Bopanna-Mergea
Rohan Bopanna and Florin Mergea, who had endured a tough season, have been showing resurgence on clay. After reaching the Madrid final last week, the sixth seeds made it to the semi-finals of Rome this week.
Unfortunately, their run came to an end in a tight two-setter at the hands of the eighth seeds Vasek Pospisil and Jack Sock, 6(4)-7, 6(2)-7.
Both the pairs broke each other twice in this evenly-contested clash. But the American-Canadian duo managed to hold their nerves in the two tie-breaks to edge out the Indo-Romanian duo in 1 hour 25 minutes.
