Taiwanese sisters Chan Hao-ching and Chan Yung-jan won yet another three-set marathon in the doubles in Charleston, South Carolina, on Thursday to make the semi-finals of the Family Circle Cup.
The quarter-final was settled in a super tiebreak, not a surprise considering that only two doubles matches have not gone the distance this week, as the sisters grabbed a 6-3, 4-6, 10-8 win over Romania’s Sorana Cirstea and Maria Kirilenko of Russia to set up a semi-final today against either Russia’s Alla Kudryavtseva and Anastasia Rodionova of Australia or fourth-seeded German duo Julia Goerges and Anna-Lena Groenefeld.
In the last remaining first-round match on Thursday, New Zealand’s Marina Erakovic and Arantxa Parra Santonja of Spain advanced when No. 1 seeds Hsieh Su-wei of Taiwan and China’s Peng Shuai were forced to retire 5-4 down in the first set because of an abdominal strain suffered by Peng.
“It’s our first time playing together,” Parra Santonja told the WTA Web site. “We have to get to know each other a little bit more, but I think we were playing well today before the injury and I think we will keep improving.”
In Thursday’s other quarter-final, third-seeded American pairing Raquel Kops-Jones and Abigail Spears survived an epic super tiebreak to defeat Serbia’s Jelena Jankovic and Andrea Petkovic of Germany 6-4, 1-6, 16-14.
Kops-Jones and Spears had played 76 super tiebreaks as a duo and had never gone beyond 14-12, which happened twice and they won in Rome in 2011 and in Carlsbad in 2012.
Meanwhile, in the first round of the doubles at the Monterrey Open, American duo Maria Sanchez and Coco Vandeweghe defeated Taiwan’s Chuang Chia-jung and Eva Hrdinova of the Czech Republic 6-3, 6-7 (5/7), 10-5.
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