Sania-Marti reach Wimbledon semis

Wimbledon, July 9: Indian tennis player Sania Mirza equalled her best performance at Wimbledon by reaching the women’s doubles semi-fils of the lone grass court Major with Swiss partner Marti Hingis here.

Sania, who had reached the semis in 2011 too with Ele Vesni, and Marti came out with a clinical performance to enter the semis on Wednesday evening. The top seeds needed only an hour and 19 minutes to beat Australian-Kazakh ninth seeds Casey Dellacqua and Yaroslava Shvedova 7-5, 6-3 in the quarter-fil played on Court 3 of the All England Club.

Sania and Marti started off on an aggressive note, winning 20 of 27 first serve points. But Dellacqua-Shvedova came back strongly by winning a break point. However, that didn’t help their cause as the top seeds were too strong to break their opponents twice that led them to take the first set 7-5.

The second set saw the top seeds play more aggressively for their quest of the semis berth. The pair broke their opponents once and a double fault by Dellacqua-Shvedova made it easy for the Indo-Swiss combine to win the set 6-3 and advance to the last four.

Sania and Marti next face American fifth seeds Raquel Kops-Jones and Abigail Spears on Friday for a spot in the fil.

Later in the first round of girls’ doubles, Colombian-Indonesian pair of Maria Fernda Herazo Gonzalez and Deria Nur Haliza defeated Indo-Japanese combine of Pranjala Yadlapalli and Chihiro Muramatsu 6-3, 6-2 in just over an hour on Court 14. IANS