WTA Championships – Schiavone and Dementieva playing for pride
With the WTA Tour Championships semi-finalists locked in after Thursday’s matches – the positions filled by Caroline Wozniacki, Samantha Stosur, Kim Clijsters and Vera Zvonareva – the remaining players in the Doha draw will be playing for pride in Friday’s final round-robin clashes. We preview their matches here.
Francesca Schiavone vs Elena Dementieva
Dementieva recovered from the ankle injury that was clearly bothering her in her opening round-robin match against Wozniacki to stage a come-from-behind victory over Stosur yesterday, winning in a final set tiebreak to keep her hopes of progressing to the semi-finals burning for a brief while longer.
The subsequent results extinguished them but it’s hard to see Dementieva, or the so far winless Schiavone, rolling over when there’s still pride, and $100,000 for each round-robin victory, to play for.
Dementieva leads the head-to-heads between the pair 7-5, winning their most recent meeting in the semi-finals in Tokyo in straight sets, and if she continues to cover the court as well as she did against Stosur yesterday, she should be able to walk away from Doha with two wins to her name.
Vera Zvonareva vs Kim Clijsters
This is a potential preview of the final, should the pair win their semi-final matches against the two semi-finalists from the Maroon Group, but there’s no need for this pair to familiarise themselves with one another’s games, having already faced off three times this year.
Zvonareva won two of them, impressively coming from a set down in the Wimbledon quarter-finals as she began to announce herself as a big game contender and backing that up with victory at the same stage of the tournament in Montreal. It was Clijsters though who had the last laugh in the US Open final, where the defending champion was in imperious form as she brushed the Russian aside 6-2, 6-1 to defend her title.
Having won her opening two matches against an ailing Jelena Jankovic and determined Victoria Azarenka, Clijsters should be content with her form in her first tournament since the US Open, while Zvonareva might have more to prove after her defeat at Flushing Meadows and may just edge Clijsters in this one.
Jelena Jankovic vs Victoria Azarenka
Azarenka has to win this one, surely? The Belarusian threw everything and the kitchen sink at Zvonareva in her opening round-robin match, but after more than two hours on court still lost in two tightly contested sets, coming back from a set down against Clijsters only for the US Open champion to storm to victory in the final set, as she ultimately won the match 6-4, 5-7, 6-1.
And so ended the eighth seed’s title hopes, but if anyone deserves to take a win away from her last match surely it’s Azarenka.
Jankovic has battled two opponents in her opening matches, the one on the other side of the net and the illness she brought with her to Doha, and was predictably beaten fairly easily on both occasions. Whether she’s recovered in time to make this match a contest will only be known when she steps on court, but on what we’ve seen so far, Azarenka should win this one.
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