The first $40,000 Women’s ITF Championships in Pune will have world’s number 71 tennis player Tatjana Maria of Germany take on Uzbekistan’s Nigina Abduraimova on the Deccan Gymkhana hard tennis courts.
It will be their first run-in in the ITF circuit after edging out their opponents in the semi-final rounds on Friday. In the first semi-final, Maria defeated eighth-seeded Ankita Raina 6-3, 6-1 in a match lasting just over an hour. In the second semi-final match, Abduraimova struggled to get past a fighting seventh-seeded Valeria Savinykh of Russia, but finally overcame her opponent and won the match 6-4, 2-6, 6-4 in two hours and 35 minutes.
In the doubles semifinal, top seeded Indian pair Raina and Prarthana Thombare outplayed third-seeded pair Diana Marcinkevica of Latvia and Dutch player Rosalie Van Der Hoek 6-1, 6-2. The Indian duo will face off with Kazakhstan’s Gozal Ainitdinova and Zhibek Kulambayeva, who edged out second-seeded Rutuja Bhosale and Ekaterina Yashina 6-4, 2-6, 10-5.