adminCollin Matiza Sports Editor
TOP Zimbabwean female tennis player Cara Black and her Indian partner Sania Mirza remained on course for their first Grand Slam title together when they stormed into the quarter-finals of the women’s doubles at the French Open in Paris yesterday.
According to reports from Roland Garros in Paris, the fifth-seeded pair of Black and Mirza booked their place in the last eight after beating Serbia’s Jelena Jankovic and Russian Alisa Kleybanova in straight sets 6-3, 6-3 in their third round match on Court Two.
Jankovic and Kleybanova were unseeded.
But Black and Mirza now have a mountain to climb in the quarter-finals of the second Grand Slam of the year where they will meet the top-seeded pair of Su-Wei Hsieh of Taipei and China’s Shuai Peng who outclassed 15th-seeded Americans Liezel Huber and Lisa Raymond 6-0, 6-2 in the other third round tie yesterday.
To reach yesterday’s third round of the French Open, Black and Mirza trounced Gabriela Dabrowski and Alicja Rosolska on Saturday.
The fifth seed Zimbabwean-Indo pair needed just 59 minutes to dispatch the unseeded Canadian-Pole team 6-1, 6-2 in the second round of the clay court Grand Slam.
Black and Mirza faced only one breakpoint in the lop-sided contest and broke their rivals four times. They won 57 points to 37 of their rivals.
And in yesterday’s third round tie against Jankovic and Kleybanova, Black and Mirza needed one hour 18 minutes to stop their unseeded opponents under a sunny day at Roland Garros.
Black and Mirza first took 44 minutes to win the first set 6-3 and a break of serve in the third game of the second set gave them a 2-1 lead and that was the tonic they needed as they went on to hold theirs in the fourth game to take a commanding 3-1 lead.
The fifth seeds broke their opponents’ serve again in the fifth game of the second set to race to a 4-1 lead and the scent of victory was in the air for them. But Jankovic and Kleybanova quickly broke back in the next game to reduce the arrears to 2-4 but Black and Mirza quickly broke back to love to lead 5-2 and were serving for the set and match in the eighth game.
But Jankovic and Kleybanova refused to go down without putting up a fight as they broke Black and Mirza’s serve to love in the eighth game to trail 3-5 but their mini revival was quickly extinguished when they failed to hold their serve in the ninth game to hand their opponents victory.
Online Reporter