Oeiras (Portugal), May 3 (IANS): India's Sania Mirza and her Zimbabwean partner Cara Black clinched their first WTA title of the season beating Eva Hrdinova and Valeria Solovyeva in the women doubles final of the Portugal Open tennis here Saturday.
Sania and Cara won 6-4, 6-3 against the Czech-Russian pair in an exciting clash that lasted one hour and 18 minutes.
For Sania and Cara the win was an atonement for their losses in the final of Indian Wells and Stuttgart.
The top-seeded pair of Sania and Cara took an early 3-1 lead. Eva and Valeria tried to come back strongly and also break the top seeds to snatch the lead by the seventh game.
Sania and Cara then broke Eva and Valeria in the eighth game to make it 4-4 and one more time in the 10th to clinch it convincingly.
In the second set also, they traded a break each and were levelled at 3-3 in the second set. But Cara committed a costly double fault and the top seeds had to pay a price losing a breakpoint. However they were soon up 4-3 and Sania served out the match in the ninth game.
Sania and Cara shared the prize money of euro 9,919 and also earned 280 ranking points each.