Harriet Dart saves two match points to reach first WTA final in Guangzhou

Harriet Dart is through to her first WTA Tour singles final after beating 16-year-old Sun Xinran 5-7 7-6 (7-1) 6-0 in the Guangzhou Open semi-final on Saturday.

The match lasted two hours and 29 minutes. Sun took the first set 7-5, but Dart fought back in the second. That set went to a tiebreak, a short sudden-death game played when a set reaches 6-6. Sun was two points from winning the match at that stage, a chance known as a match point, and Dart saved both of them. Dart then won the tiebreak 7-1 and took the decider 6-0. Dart saves two match points to beat Sun and reach first WTA final tells the story of that turnaround.

The Briton will now face fourth seed Lilli Tagger in the final. A seed is a player ranked highly enough to be kept apart from the strongest opponents in the early rounds. Tagger, who is 18 and ranked 53rd, won the Prague Open in July and took the French Open junior title last year. She beat Venus Williams in round one, then won her semi-final 6-2 6-0 in 53 minutes against Kaitlin Quevedo.

Dart made her WTA debut at Eastbourne in 2015. Her previous semi-final at tour level came at the 2024 Transylvania Open. Her career-high ranking is 70th, and live WTA standings show her climbing 14 places to 101st after this result. The WTA ranking orders players by the points they earn from recent events, so a deep run like this one moves her up the list.

Sun, the junior world No. 1 and reigning US Open junior champion, entered Guangzhou as a wildcard, a place handed out by organisers rather than won through the rankings. She had already beaten Maria Timofeeva from match point down on her way to the semi-final. Her run in China has been one of the stories of the tournament, and she leaves with a lot of experience from a long, demanding week.

Dart against Tagger is the final on the WTA Tour this week. A first title would be the next step for a player who has been building her ranking one match at a time.