SINGAPORE (AP) Top-seeded pairing Martina Hingis and Sania Mirza cruised to the doubles title at the WTA Finals with a 6-0, 6-3 victory on Sunday against the Spanish duo of Garbine Muguruza and Carla Suarez Navarro.
The title capped a super year for Hingis and Mirza, who only started playing together in March and claimed nine titles this year, including at Wimbledon and the U.S. Open.
Mirza was the defending champion having won the title with Cara Black of Zimbabwe last year.
Hingis last played in a WTA Finals title match 15 years ago. The victory is Hingis' 50th career doubles title, and her third (1999 and 2000) at the season-ender.
Hingis and Mirza never dropped a set and won the title match in a swift 66 minutes. They are unbeaten in their last 22 matches. They began playing together in March and won three straight tournaments: Indian Wells, Miami and Charleston.
“We created opportunities. Even the first two, three matches, sometimes you have struggles when you don't know the opponents and everything, don't know each other,” Hingis said. “But we found solutions, and that's what makes a strong team. Now we've been playing very solidly like against the lower‑ranked teams, and then we've played the Chan sisters [who they beat in the semifinals of the WTA Finals] like the last seven or eight [times]. So it's like you know what to expect from them and they know what to expect from us. It's just like making that extra—we made each other also better.
"And then pushing with the other teams and trying to just keep it in matches keep it going. We still had to prove ourselves. We won the three [tournaments] and then maybe the clay court season is not our best surface. Then it clicked back in Wimbledon. That was an incredible victory in the finals being down. That was when it all start to happen, that we knew we can win big events, like Grand Slams.”
Hingis and Mirza beat Elena Vesnina and Ekaterina Makarova in the Wimbledon final, 5-7, 7-6 (4), 7-5. The former No. 1 Hingis has won 11 Grand Slam doubles titles, while Mirza won her first two doubles majors this year with Hingis.
“We react to situations we know. Like I know how [Hingis] reacts to morning, and she knows how I react to a situation when I'm not feeling great,” Mirza said. “I think when you know that about each other you can help each other out. That's what doubles is about, and any sport where you have two people. It's the communication. We leave it out there. We try and be honest as we can with each other how we're feeling. If I'm feeling like crap, I'm like, I'm not feeling great. Can you do something. She does the same thing. That's really how, and we try and communicate as much as possible.”
Additional reporting by Matt Cronin.