After 14 titles in 16 months, Sania Mirza and Martina Hingis call off their partnership. But why?

One of the greatest women’s doubles pairs of the Open Era called time on a pairing which had seen the duo take the world of women’s tennis by storm over the course of 16 months, running up a winning streak of 41 matches and nine Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) title wins on the trot.

Switzerland's Martina Hingis and India's Sania Mirza, also known as “Santina”, were a lethal combination when they were firing on all cylinders as a team. Individually, they were also the best singles and doubles players from the Open Era of women's tennis from their respective countries.

Mirza and Hingis won three of the six Grand Slams that they contested in during the course of their partnership. “Santina” won Wimbledon, the US Open and the Australian Open in a row, but failed to win at Roland Garros in two attempts.

Hot streak

They emerged as a force after winning the highest number of consecutive matches in women’s doubles tennis in 25 years, and second only to the 44 won on the trot by the team of Natasha Zvereva of Belarus and Jana Novotna of Czechslovakia in 1990. Their streak, which started at the US Open in September 2015, ended in Doha, Qatar in February 2016 at the quarterfinal stage when they were defeated by Daria Kasatkina and Elena Vesnina of Russia.

Ironically, it was Doha where Mirza had played her last doubles tournament before joining hands with Hingis to win three straight WTA tournaments at Miami, Charleston and Indian Wells and their first 20 sets.

The uncertainty introduced by the use of a Super Tie-breaker (first to 10 points wins) instead of a third set in the doubles format to decide the match has meant that it has become tougher than before to stitch together such winning streaks.

2015: a golden year

Both the players were enjoying a resurgence in their tennis careers. Hingis was now free of the injuries and a two-year suspension for the use of benzoylecgonine, a metabolite of cocaine, handed to her by the WTA. She had come out of retirement for a second time in 2013 at the age of 32, to start a third innings.

She had even played in the 2015 Fed Cup after a 17-year absence from the annual women’s tennis event contested between nations, analogous to the Davis Cup played for men.

While Hingis's achievements in singles need no introduction, her doubles career is impressive as only six players from three stupendous pairings – Martina Navratilova–Pam Shriver, Natasha Zvereva–Gigi Fernandez, Serena Williams-Venus Williams – have more doubles titles than Hingis who has 12. Navratilova and Shriver also boast of the longest winning streak in WTA doubles tournaments, 109, set between 1983 and 1985.

For Hingis, 2015 was a year of resurgence in the women’s doubles game. She enjoyed her best year in Grand Slam doubles since 1998 and won her third WTA tour finals, her first since 2000.

Hingis’s net play had served as the perfect cover for Mirza’s weak first serve, one of the reasons behind Sania’s limited success in the singles game. Hingis also brought the best out in Mirza, enabling her to showcase her primary weapons, the sharp returns of serve and her baseline stroke-play.

Mirza, 29, remains India’s most influential women’s tennis player in both singles and doubles in the Open Era, more than 11 years after having won her’s and India’s only WTA tour singles title to date in February 2005. The biggest win of her career was also incidentally against Hingis in the 2006 Korean Open.

It seems like an eon since Mirza was the darling of the singles world when she was voted WTA Newcomer of the Year at the age of 18 in 2005, a year in which she became the first Indian woman to reach the fourth round of a Grand Slam at the US Open and lost to eventual champion Serena Williams in the third round of the Australian Open.

But injuries and inconsistency finally took their toll on Mirza, whose singles ranking had once been as high as No. 27, making her the first female Indian player to be seeded at a Grand Slam. In thirteen years of playing competitive doubles, Sania enjoyed the best doubles season of her career, with a win-loss record of 65-12 – a win percentage of 84.4 per cent – in 2015.

Before she joined up with Hingis, Mirza had been a consistent doubles player, but the emergence of “Santina” saw her climb to No. 1 in the world, a spot which she has not relinquished in 69 weeks, the sixth-highest streak in the Open Era.

It was with Hingis, her 70th different doubles partner, that Mirza notched up her first and only three Grand Slam wins, also retaining the WTA Tour Finals title, which she had won for the first time in 2014.

In his column for the AnandaBazarPatrika, veteran tennis player and ex-Davis Cup captain Jaidip Mukerjea contends that the main reason for the split is that the differences between the two had escalated during the mixed doubles encounters between Mirza and partner Ivan Dodig, and Hingis and her partner Leander Paes.

While Mirza and Dodig won their first encounter earlier this year, Hingis and Paes extracted revenge in the French Open final, and the rift between them had widened because Mirza had reacted badly to the loss, according to Mukerjea. Mirza also chose Rohan Bopanna over Leander Paes as her mixed doubles partner for the Olympics after the selection fiasco in 2012.

Whether this is the reason or not, in the end the titles dried up for "Santina" and the pair were not at their best, winning only one out of the last ten tournaments they had played. Along the way they had lost to doubles pairs ranked outside the top 100, indicating that not all was right between two players who had looked unstoppable as a pair just the other day.

The two have decided to go with different partners for the US Open but remain ranked No. 1 and have qualified for the season-ending WTA tour finals. Neither of them will particularly savour coming up against the other.

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