Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Chan Yung-jan face Red Group winners, top seeds and tournament favorites Martina Hingis and Sania Mirza in the semi-finals at the WTA Finals in Singapore at 12:30pm today after they finished second in the White Group with a 2-1 record.
The Swiss-Indian pairing defeated Timea Babos of Hungary and Kristina Mladenovic of France 6-4, 7-5 in 1 hour, 30 minutes yesterday to complete a clean sweep of their round-robin matches.
“We had played them twice before and we were 1-all, so we knew we had to come out and play well, like we’ve been trying to do every match here at the WTA Finals,” Mirza said in her courtside interview. “We just tried to come out and play our best, and that was enough to win today.”
Photo: AP
The victory extended the top seeds’ winning streak to 20 matches.
“It feels pretty good,” Hingis said. “Sania came up to me and asked me why don’t we try to play together, and at first we both had our partners, but as soon as we started we won a hat-trick right away at Indian Wells, Miami and Charleston. It was amazing how fast we clicked. It was a dream to come here to Singapore and hopefully we can keep winning here.”
The Chan sisters came second in the group due to having won a game fewer than Spanish duo Garbine Muguruza and Carla Suarez Navarro, despite having a higher win percentage.
The difference came down to the Spanish duo being taken to a 12th game in the first set of both of their victories, a 7-5, 6-4 win over the Chan sisters on Thursday and their 7-5, 6-2 win against Caroline Garcia and Katarina Srebotnik.
The Taiwanese duo followed up their opening 6-4, 7-6 (7/5) victory over Garcia and Srebotnik with a 6-2, 6-2 demolition of Bethanie Mattek-Sands and Lucie Safarova, which was not afforded the same status in a scoring system where the group placing is decided by the number of games won, rather than by the win percentage.
Should the Chan sisters have won that match 7-5, 7-5 they would have topped the table and avoided the top seeds in today’s semi-finals.
In a world in which sports are plagued by betting syndicates attempting to fix matches for financial gain, a scoring system which does not reward teams who play their best tennis to win matches in a fair and honest way, but penalizes a team for playing an exceptional match — such as the Chan sisters’ win over Mattek-Sands and Safarova — needs to be replaced.
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