Tennis: No stroll as Zheng and Yan clinch gold

Zheng Jie stepped up her game in the second set tiebreak to claim her second gold medal of the 15th Asian Games, partnering Yan Zi to a 6-1, 7-6 (7-5) victory in the women's doubles final at Khalifa International Tennis and Squash Complex.

The Chinese top seeds appeared to be on course for an emphatic victory against Chan Yung Jan and Chuang Chia Jung of Chinese Taipei after rattling through the first set 6-1 in only 24 minutes on centre court on Thursday 14 December.

However Chan and Chuang had other ideas, breaking Yan in the opening game of the set and then doing the same to Zheng - at 23 the oldest of the four players on court - to take a 3-0 lead and make a deciding set seem likely. The two breaks though succeeded only in refocusing the Chinese duo, who are ranked third and fourth in the world rankings - giving them a combined ranking 183 places better than their opponents - and they broke back to trail 3-2.

Chan and Chuang, the No 4 seeds at Doha 2006, stopped the run by holding serve, only for the more experienced Chinese pair to reel off three games in a row to lead 5-4 with Zheng to serve for the match.

Uncharacteristically, the best player on the court, who had won the women's singles title in three sets on Wednesday, dropped serve and the tense encounter ultimately headed for a tiebreak.

Zheng and Yan raced into a 3-0 lead in that, but once again the Chinese Taipei pair refused to let the two-time Grand Slam champions in 2006 - the first ever won by Chinese players - to stroll to victory.

This proved only a temporary fightback though as some fantastic down the line shots and a volley at the net by Zheng earned her team two match points. The first was saved, but as the service return ballooned wide the celebrations began.

"In the second set our opponents played very well. They were a threat to us. This is the final so we were a little bit nervous, but we were able to keep up. It was a tight game," Yan admitted.

"As soon as the opportunity arose we tried to seize it [in the second set]. But we took it one step at a time, there was no rush. We tried to keep the score tight. We weren't really thinking about the gold medal."

Chan added: "We played very conservatively for the first set. We weren't brave enough. But from the second set we got used to the way our opponents played so we played better than the first set.

"But we didn't deal with some of the crucial points, so we lost the second set. I think our opponents deal with the important points better than us. We feel very sorry to lose this game, but we are satisfied with winning the silver medal because they are world-class players and it helps us to learn a lot from them by playing them."

Zheng and Yan are the second Chinese pair to win the women's doubles at an Asian Games following the success of Li Fang and Chen Li in the 1998 edition in Bangkok, Thailand.

The bronze medals were automatically awarded to the losing semifinalists in China's Li Ting and Sun Tiantian, who lost to Chan and Chuang, and Ryoko Fuda and Tomoko Yonemura of Japan.

15th Asian Games, Doha 2006