On Wednesday, Sania Mirza and Rohan Bopanna defeated third-seeded Desirae Krawczyk and Neal Skupski 7-6(5), 6-7(5), and 10-6 to go to the Australian Open mixed doubles championship round. The Latvian-Spanish team of Jelena Ostapenko & David Vega Hernandez gave the Indian pair a walkover in the quarterfinals, securing their spot in the semi-finals on Tuesday.
The Rio Olympic semifinalists overcame Makoto Ninomiya of Japan and Ariel Behar of Uruguay 6-4, 7-6(11-9) on Monday to go to the quarterfinals against Ostapenko and Hernandez. In the first round, the Indian team defeated Australia’s Jaimee Fourlis and Luke Saville. Bopanna and his partner Mathew Ebden, who were seeded 10th, had fallen in the first round of the men’s doubles competition, while Mirza and her partner Anna Danilina from Kazakhstan had lost in the second round of the women’s doubles competition.
Yuki Bhambri, Saketh Myneni, and Ramkumar Ramanathan had all lost in the first round, as had they and their Mexican partner Miguel Angel Reyes-Varela. Before withdrawing, Jeevan Nedunchezhiyan and N Sriram Balaji had advanced to the second round. Men’s singles competition had no Indian competitors. Sania, a six-time Grand Slam champion, is competing in her last major tournament before her retirement from tennis on February 19 at the Dubai Tennis Championships, a WTA 1000 competition.
Sania has won six major doubles championships, including the Australian Open mixed doubles trophy in 2009 with Mahesh Bhupathi. She has won three women’s doubles titles and five mixed doubles wins. In the Australian Open doubles semi-final’s deciding set, a ten-point tiebreaker, Sania and Bopanna jumped off to a five-point lead and held it from then on to win the breaker 10-6 and go to the final. In their final match, Sania-Bopanna will compete in their first-ever Grand Slam final. Most notably, the pair competed in the semifinals of the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio. In the second semi-final, Rafael Matos and Luisa Stefani of Brazil and Olivia Gadecki and Marc Polmans of Australia will compete for the title.