Italy’s Errani and Vinci claim doubles title

Doha: The top seed pair of Sara Errani and Roberta Vinci won their third straight doubles title this year after they beat Nadia Petrova and Katarine Srebotnik to take the Qatar Total Open title at the Khalifa International Tennis and Squash Complex here yesterday.

The Italian pair, who had won the Australian Open and the Paris Indoors titles coming into this tournament, won 2-6, 6-3, 10-6.

This was Vinci’s second title in Doha – she had won the doubles title at the first ever Qatar Open held in 2001 with Frenchwoman Sandrine Testud.

The match started, a la the semifinals against Anna-Lena Groenefeld and Kveta Peschke, with the top seed losing the first set.

The Italians then changed gears to win the second set 6-3 to force a match tie-breaker, which didn’t exactly go according to plan for them. Petrova-Srebotnik raced away to a 4-0 lead before their opponents restored parity.

Right then, seemed like a switch flipped and almost all of Srebotnik’s volleys and returns went haywire. The Russian-Slovenian pair pulled one back but it was too late as the top seeds had surged to a 9-5 lead. A cracker of a serve down the spine by Errani finished off the matter.