Paris, May 26 Six-time Grand Slam champion Sania Mirza and her Czech partner Lucie Hradecka came from behind to win the opening round of the French Open women's doubles event, here on Thursday.
Saina and Lucie, seeded 10th, beat the Italian pair of Jasmine Paolini and Martina Trevisan 4-6, 6-2, 6-1 in one hour and 58 minutes.
Paolini and Trevisan started serving in the first set and both the doubles teams held serves till the ninth game. However, four unforced errors in the 10th game cost Sania Mirza and Lucie Hradecka the first set and they trailed 1-0 in the match.
Sania-Hradecka, who committed 19 unforced errors in the first set, pulled up their socks in the second set and broke their opponents twice after being tied at 2-2. After stretching the match into the deciding set, Mirza and Hradecka, both former French Open champions, brought their A-game to the fore and sealed the contest convincingly.
The Indo-Czech pair, who made it to WTA 250 Strasbourg Open final last week, will face the Slovenian pair of Kaja Juvanthe and Tamara Zidansek in the second round.
In the men's doubles, Rohan Bopanna and his Dutch partner Matwe Middelkoop progressed to the quarter-finals with a 6-3, 6-4 win over Kazakhstan's Andrey Golubev and Fabrice Martin of France in the second round.
Seeded 16th, Bopanna and Middelkoop will face second seeds Nikola Mektic and Mate Pavis of Croatia for a place in the Roland Garros semi-finals.
However, Ramkumar Ramanathan and his men's doubles partner Hunter Reese of the USA, lost their second-round match to sixth seeds Wesley Koolhof of the Netherlands and Neal Skupski of Great Britain 6-3, 6-2 in one hour and 27 minutes.
Earlier, Sania had also advanced to the second round of the mixed doubles with Ivan Dodig.However, they are expected to face an uphill task in the next round against Brazil's Beatriz Haddad Maia and Bruno Soares, who beat top seeds Nicolas Mahut of France and Shuai Zhang of China, to progress.
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