By Sumayya
WUHAN — Canada’s Gabriela Dabrowski and her Brazilian teammate Luisa Stefani won the women’s doubles trophy Sunday at the Wuhan Open tennis tournament.
The top-ranked pair beat the number three seeds, Australian Storm Hunter and Czech Katerina Siniakova, with scores of 7-5, 6-4 in the final match. Hunter and Siniakova came into the tournament as the past champions trying to protect their title.
This victory marks the sixth win of the year for Dabrowski, who comes from Ottawa, and Stefani. It also gave them their eighth tournament win as a duo and their third trophy in a row. Along with this success, Dabrowski and Stefani made their total career record better at 79 wins and 19 losses, which lets them enter the big, year-ending WTA final tournament next month.
For Dabrowski alone, this was her 26th career doubles trophy win. “I’m really pleased with where we are and where our level is,” Dabrowski stated. “So it’s really nice to see it pay off in results consistently throughout the season.”
During the game, Dabrowski and Stefani hit more unreturnable serves, called aces, finishing with five while their opponents got none. They also made fewer serving mistakes, with three double faults compared to four from the other team.
Additionally, they successfully broke their opponents’ serve five times out of 19 chances. On the other side, Hunter and Siniakova scored on three out of their eight serve-break opportunities.
Dabrowski and Stefani took a serve break early to get a 4-1 lead in the first part of the game, but Hunter and Siniakova fought back hard to level the score.
The top-ranked partners broke the serve again in the 12th game to win the first set. In the second set, they broke their opponents’
serve twice while losing their own serve only one time, finishing the entire match victory in one hour and 32 minutes.
