Britain\u2019s Harriet Dart won her first WTA title after coming from a set down to beat Lilli Tagger in the final of the Guangzhou Open in China. Dart, who saved three match points in her semi-final win over Sun Xinran to reach her first tour-level final, edged a thrilling match against the 18-year-old from Austria 4-6, 6-3, 6-4.<\/p>\n
Dart, the British No 5 and a qualifier, dropped serve in the opening game and had to save a break point in her next service game before finally getting on the board against the fourth seed. The 30-year-old from Hampstead broke back for 4-4, but Tagger, who won the 2025 junior French Open, hit straight back before wrapping up the first set.<\/p>\n
A tearful Harriet Dart covers her eyes after beating Lilli Tagger of Austria in the Guangzhou Open final. Photograph: AP<\/p>\n
The first break point of the second set came the way of Dart, who took it for 5-3 on her way to levelling the match.<\/p>\n
In a tense deciding set, a run of five consecutive breaks of serve ended when a gutsy Dart saved two break points to hold for 5-3. In the next she brought up two championship points, but a big Tagger serve saved the first before Dart netted a mid-court forehand on the second. However, the Briton wiped that miss from her mind to serve out the match to 15, falling on her back in delight when victory was sealed with an unreturned serve.<\/p>\n
Dart, who has been working with the former Wimbledon champion Marion Bartoli, said on court: \u201cI\u2019ll try not to get too emotional. A big thank you to my team this week. It\u2019s amazing to play in front of such a big crowd. It\u2019s been so much fun here and I really appreciate it and hope to be back next year.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis week shows that even when I\u2019m down \u2013 and people think I\u2019m down and out \u2013 I\u2019m still able to overcome it. Today was a really tough match. I have no doubt Lilli will go on and win multiple titles. To come through a week like this means a lot.\u201d<\/p>\n
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If you don’t have the Guardian app, download it from the\u00a0iOS App Store<\/a>\u00a0on iPhone or the\u00a0Google Play store<\/a>\u00a0on Android by searching for ‘The Guardian’.<\/p>\n Thank you for your feedback.<\/p>\n Dart\u2019s victory will lift her back into the top 100 and earns her direct entry into the Australian Open in January. She has won 19 of her 24 tour-level matches on the hard courts since Wimbledon, taking her overall record on the tour this season to 23 victories from 34 matches \u2013 the highest winning percentage of her career.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Britain\u2019s Harriet Dart won her first WTA title after coming from a set down to beat Lilli Tagger…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":820865,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[101,118,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-820864","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-sports","tag-tennis","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/820864","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=820864"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/820864\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/820865"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=820864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=820864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=820864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}