Hard and with the steering wheel: Andreeva defeated Svitolina at the Final WTA Championship

Mirra Andreeva made her debut very confidently at the Final WTA Singles Championship. A year ago, the Russian failed at the end of the season, at the Final, which was then held in Riyadh (Saudi Arabia), she got only paired with Diana Schneider, at the last moment losing her ticket to the singles tournament against Elena Rybakina, and lost all three matches with Diana. This time it's different. Andreeva had a great year, became the Grand Slam champion for the first time in her career, winning Roland Garros, and qualified in advance for the Final Tournament, which temporarily moved to Indian Wells. In her first singles match at these competitions, Mirra confidently defeated Ukrainian Elina Svitolina, who refused to share a photo with all the participants due to the presence of Andreeva and Belarusian tennis player Arina Sobolenko.

Under zero

Andreeva entered the court with her second run after a hard-fought battle between Arina Sobolenko and Karolina Mukhova. Now the former world number one has won a hard-fought victory in two games, winning back the serve of the 2026 Wimbledon finalist for a set, and in the second game she served for the match on the second attempt. — 7:6 (7:2), 7:5.

For both Mirra and Elina Svitolina, this was the first match in about a month. Andreeva reached the finals of the thousandth round in Beijing in the first half of October, after which she withdrew from the tournament of the same category in Wuhan. Svitolina, after the quarterfinals in Beijing (both, by the way, lost in the capital of China, Zheng Qingwen), flew to Wuhan, won two victories there and also flew out at the quarterfinal stage. She withdrew from the tournaments in Ningbo and Tokyo, for which the Ukrainian initially applied, most likely against the background of a wave of hate on social networks, which rose after everyone became aware of her decision to divorce Gael Monfils and that the Frenchman became depressed and ended his career prematurely. without finally hosting the home tournaments in Lyon and Paris.

It is very difficult to say how much Elina managed to abstract herself from her personal life here in Indian Wells. Anyway, she came to the Final, being the first tennis mom in 16 years to qualify here in singles. In 2010, Kim Kleisters succeeded, who then returned to the tour after her career ended and became the champion of the Final, held in Doha. In short, this achievement is rare and significant in itself.

According to personal meetings, Andreeva and Svitolina had a 1-1 balance. Mirra beat her in 2025 in the quarterfinals of Indian Wells (on these courts, but in another tournament regularly held in the spring of the millennium), and Elina took revenge at the beginning of this season, knocking out the Russian in the fourth round of the Australian Open. Both matches ended in two sets and without tie-breaks.

Since the beginning of the match, Svitolina has made a lot of blunders. Andreeva also had enough inaccuracies, but her mistakes were more playful — Mirra attacked and often missed the court a little, while Elina had breakdowns, hitting the ball far from the center of the racket. The Ukrainian took the game with the score 1:1 from a break point, but already in the fifth game she failed, losing it to zero and ending with two double faults! Andreeva then also won her serve dry, taking 12 points in a row as a result. At the end of the game, however, I still had to be nervous — first there was a game won from 15:30, and on serving for the set, a couple of unforced errors by the Russian woman led to a break point. However, Mirra confidently played him offensively, and on the set she screwed in a beautiful pass from defense, which Elina could not cope with.

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This outcome of the game did not give any reason to relax, but in the second set, the fight unexpectedly did not work out at all. More precisely, there was a struggle within the games, but all the key points remained with Andreeva. The score was growing rapidly in her favor, and Myrrha also delivered several truly magnificent backhands. Interestingly, not a single game of this set was complete without double faults, but again Andreeva coped with their consequences, even when she made two doubles in a row, and Svitolina did not succeed. In the end, the Russian woman stalled a little, giving her opponent four break points one after the other with her inaccuracies, but in the end she served for the match on the first attempt, making a "steering wheel"! Mirra became the youngest tennis player to win a match at the Final Tournament since 2009, when Caroline Wozniacki, being about three months younger, won two group victories and reached the semifinals.

Svitolina refused to shake hands with Andreeva

For political reasons, Ukrainian tennis player Elina Svitolina refused to participate in a joint photo shoot with Russian Mirra Andreeva and Belarusian Arina Sobolenko before the Final WTA tournament. As a result, the organizers abandoned the traditional general picture of the eight participants and limited themselves to individual portraits of the participants. In the official message of the association, the format change is explained by the desire to make the frames more personalized. Svitolina also abandoned the traditional handshake after losing to Mirra.

In the second round, Andreeva will play Arina Sobolenko, and Elina is scheduled to face Karolina Mukhova. By the way, if Andreeva defeats Sobolenko (and the only time Mirra beat her on hard court was in Indian Wells, in the 2025 finals), she will overtake the Belarusian in the live rating. It is clear that this will not be the final result in any case, but the chances of being above Arina at the end of this tournament and, accordingly, finishing the season as the second racket of the world for Andreeva are quite real.

Moreover, if Mirra manages to take the title here, having passed the tournament without defeats, she will be less than 300 points behind the first racket of the world Elena Rybakina, who withdrew from the Final due to poor health.