The last remaining Taiwanese was knocked out at Wimbledon on Wednesday when Hsieh Su-wei and Flavia Pennetta were beaten in the quarter-finals of the women’s doubles.
The seventh seeds fell to a 6-3, 4-6, 6-4 defeat to fourth seeds Timea Babos and Kristina Mladenovic in 1 hour, 37 minutes at the All England Lawn Tennis Club in southwest London.
A slow start once again made it an uphill battle for the Taiwanese-Italian pairing as their Hungarian-French opponents raced to a 5-0 lead in the first set and despite the seventh seeds breaking back, they could not repair the damage.
Hsieh and Pennetta then converted one of the three break points they created in the second set to level the match and one of five in the decider, but the fourth seeds converted both of their break points in the third set to claim the victory on Court 18 late on Wednesday evening.
“We started the match on a very high level,” Babos told the tournament Web site. “We both played very good and after it was getting more difficult. They changed a little bit their game plan and of course it’s not possible to play a whole match like the level we had in the beginning. Maybe we started to let them play their game instead of playing our game. In the third set, we put everything together and we were very aggressive.”
In all, Hsieh and Pennetta converted three of 11 break points, but they failed to save any of the four they faced as their opponents won 90 of the 173 points contested.
Babos and Mladenovic face second-seeded Russian pairing Ekaterina Makarova and Elena Vesnina in the semi-finals after they saw off veterans Cara Black of Zimbabwe and Lisa Raymond of the US 6-3, 4-6, 8-6.
In the other semi-final, top seeds Martina Hingis of Switzerland and Sania Mirza of India take on fifth-seeded US duo Raquel Kops-Jones and Abigail Spears, who ousted third seeds Bethanie Mattek-Sands of the US and Lucie Safarova of the Czech Republic 6-3, 6-2.
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