Bittersweet Results for India’s Sania Mirza

By Parvez Fatteh, Founder of http://sportingummah.com, sports@muslimobserver.com

It was a week of rising and falling fortunes for Indian tennis star Sania Mirza. The Hyderabad native has had, for the most part, a disappointing tennis year thus far, experiencing a combination of injuries and early exits. So the plan was to then play a somewhat lower level tournament to help regain her form and her confidence, and to help re-establish her health. The Aegon Great Britain Pro-Series event at Wrexham, England presented just such an opportunity.

Mirza was cruising along in both the singles and doubles events. In doubles, she ultimately took home the title, as she and her Finnish partner, Emma Laine, won the final match over a couple of Brits, Tara Moore and Francesca Stephenson, 2-6, 6-3, 13-11. As the number 1 seed in singles, she was establishing her dominance there as well. And in the semifinals she defeated her doubles partner, Laine, 6-1, 6-4, to make it to the ladies’ finals. The championship proved to be a let-down for Mirza, however. Going up against 18-year-old Brit Heather Watson, Mirza was overmatched and went down relatively easily 6-2, 6-4. It may have been some consolation to know that Watson was the reigning Junior U.S. Open winner. But that is small consolation indeed when combined with the fact that Watson was ranked only 252 in the world.

The new Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) rankings were released the Monday after the tournament, and they showed that Sania’s ranking had subsequently slipped from 11 points from 131 to 142. However, she had moved up 6 points in the ladies’ doubles rankings, from 93 to 87.

On the men’s side, Pakistan’s Aisam-Ul-Haq Qureshi is ranked 39 in the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) men’s doubles rankings. Qureshi will be playing in an upcoming string of doubles tournaments with his partner Rohan Bopanna of India, beginning with the Farmers ATP Classic in Los Angeles beginning the week of Monday July 26.

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