Chinese tennis professional, Peng Shuai. (Photo : Reuters)
While China continues its desperate search for their next female tennis star, after Grand Slam champion Li Na entered retirement with an injury that refuses to disappear, two "Golden Flowers" lost their matches this week in Dubai.
Both Peng Shuai and Wang Qiang were forced to bow out of the Dubai Duty Free Tennis Championships after on-court defeats on Wednesday.
Playing under harsh, desert-like weather conditions, Peng was unable to prevail from a closely contested encounter against Bulgaria's Tsvetana Pironkova in their second-round tournament match.
Unfortunately for the top-ranked Chinese player, she was unable to replicate her U.S. Open form (which delivered her to the semi-finals in 2014) and dropped the second and third sets after emerging the victor, 6-3, at the end of the first set.
While the second set of games was lost 6-4, Pironkova just managed to leave the court with the edge, winning 7-6 in a third-set tiebreaker.
Wang Qiang lost to 10th-seed Flavia Pennetta, who beat her Chinese opponent in straight sets.
Italian Pennetta will next play against seventh-seed, Angelique Kerber, while Pironkova will play opposite top-seeded Romanian, Simona Halep, in the next round.
According to the Chinese sports media, the exhilaration of the retired Li's victory at the Australian Open final in 2014 was dampened by her departure from the competition, while her inability to defend her title at the 2015 Melbourne event was like salt being rubbed into the wound of the national tennis mindset.
However, American Terry Rhoads, who is the managing director of Chinese sports branding agency Zou Marketing and previously worked with Li, told the New York Times in January that "Chinese tennis is going to go to the moon."
