The Sunday Mail
Zimbabwe’s tennis superstar Cara Black moved closer to grabbing her second title of the year after storming into the WTA Toray Pan Pacific Open final with another dominating performance on the fast courts of Tokyo late on Friday.
Black and her abiding partner, Sania Mirza, outclassed Jelena Jankovic and Arantxa Parra Santonja 6-3 6-2 to reach the summit clash of the Japanese flagship tennis tournament.
The top seeded Indo-Zimbabwean pair took only 63 minutes to overcome the unseeded Serbian-Spanish combo in the semifinals of the USD 1,000,000 hard court event and are favourites later today to defend the title they won for the first time together last year.
Cara and Sania, who on May 14 this year bagged the Portugal Open as their first accolade of the season, played tremendous service games, winning 24 of the 30 first service points, according to reports from Tokyo.
They surrendered serve only one time while saving four break chances. On the other side of the net, Jelena and Arantxa could only capitalise on one of the five chances they got in the contest.
The fourth seeded Spanish duo of Garbine Muguruza and Carla Suarez-Navarro are now the last bulwark in the way of Black and Mirza who are appearing in their fifth women’s doubles final of the year, after reaching the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, United States in March, the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix in Stuttgart, Germany in April, the Portugal Open in Oeiras in May and Rogers Cup in Montreal, Canada in August.
An updated report will be available for tomorrow’s sports news edition
