Iga Swiatek defends Doha Open title with clean sweep

World No 1 Iga Swiatek successfully defended her Qatar Open title with a 6-3, 6-0 win over Jessica Pegula in the championship match.

Swiatek only dropped five games across the week in an imperious return to the WTA Tour.

The Pole avenged her loss to Pegula at the United Cup earlier this season handing out another bagel as she clinched the title in emphatic style.

“I’m really happy that I could kind of find more balance comparing to how I felt at the beginning of the season,” Swiatek said, after her win in Doha.

“I think this tournament is going to give me a lot of confidence, but still, I want to take everything step by step.

“I’m just really happy that I could win this match today.”

The victory on Saturday gives Swiatek a 5-2 lead in her head-to-head series against Pegula.

Swiatek has won her first title of the season at the sam event that first saw her come out victorious in 2022.

Last season her Doha run sparked a 37-match unbeaten streak that was the talk of the early season.

Swiatek said that she felt more focused through this week than she was during an Australian Open that came at her really fast.

She also credited the extensive work her coach has put in with her as helping get her back into flow.

“Every game I was really focused, and that’s the thing I’m most happy about, because at the beginning of the season I felt like my mind was kind of flying away sometimes,” Swiatek said. “But here, the work we have put in with my coach on court and with Daria off the court, for sure, it just paid off, and I felt like everything is clicking.”

Swiatek felt that her game was coming naturally to her as she made excellent use of the windy conditions.

“Yesterday it kind of hit me that even though it’s windy, I can use the wind properly and kind of use my intuition to sometimes imagine that I should play shorter, or on the other hand, play with more topspin so the wind is going to kind of take this ball even further,” Swiatek said.

“So today I just kind of continued that, but I didn’t really want to overanalyze that, and I just kind of played how my intuition told me. It’s nice, because usually I’m basing everything on my tactics and on the technique that I’m working on. But here I felt like I could just reset that and play more freely without overthinking.”

Swiatek is also the defending champion for next week’s WTA 1000 Dubai Tennis Championships.