体坛英语新闻：Williams to compete with Halep again at WTA Championships

SINGAPORE, Oct. 25 (Xinhua) -- After three sets of fierce competition with her good friend Wozniacki, world's top seed Serena Williams managed to qualify for the WTA Championships to be held on Sunday. She will again compete with Simona Halep, who gave the American an ugly 6-0 and 6-2 during the round robins on Wednesday.

It was not a good start for Williams. Wozniacki, who qualified the semifinals with all wins during the round robins, got the first breakpoints and led the game by 3-0. The Poland girl maintained the leadership in the first set, finishing it at 6-2.

Both of them held serves at the beginning of the second set, before Williams, who successfully broke at the third point, started to fight back. The World No. 1 threw herself into the race in full force, and ended the second set with 6-3.

Audiences were treated with another ferocious battle during the

final set, where Wozniacki first took the opportunity and led the game at 5-4. However, she failed in keeping the momentum while Williams dragged the game into a tie break and finally overtook her rival at 7-6.

Williams, who qualified for the championship, was not satisfied with her performance. "Why am I starting out so flat? I had a good warm up and I wanted to have a really good start, but it just wasn 't happening." She said, "I need figure that out actually, because it's inexcusable for it to happen once, let alone twice."

Williams will be fighting with Halep on Sunday's championship, the latter crushed Radwanska with two 6-2s at Saturday's semifinals. Certainly it would be a good game as the American was swept by Halep just three days ago. Williams made it clear that she won't allow another battle like Wednesday's happen.

"I didn't want a repeat of the other day, so my whole goal was just to not lose 6-Love." She said.

As to the women's doubles, defending champion Peng Shuai and Hsieh Su-Wei took a fast win against Alla Kudryavtseva and Anastasia Rodionova with 6-1 and 6-4. They will seek their second WTA championship against Cara Black and Sania Mirza, the latter just experienced a thrilling three-set match against Kveta Peschke and Katarina Srebotnik en route to a 4-6, 7-5 and 11-9 victory.