Down 4-1 to the woman who has spent the season on top of women’s tennis, Mirra Andreeva did not lose another game. The Russian teenager reeled off 11 in a row to beat Aryna Sabalenka 6-4, 6-0 in 62 minutes on Wednesday, November 11, at the WTA Finals in Indian Wells, California.
The WTA’s own match report puts the collapse in even starker terms: Andreeva took 45 of the last 55 points. The win sent her through as the winner of Group 2 and into her first semifinal at the season-ending championship.
From double fault to three straight aces
The opening half hour went Sabalenka’s way. She broke for 3-1, moved ahead 4-1 and was hitting winners freely. Andreeva said the double fault that cost her that service game left her fuming.
“I was angry,” she told reporters afterward. She explained that serving next gave her an outlet: “I kind of was able to turn that anger into trying to serve faster.”
Then the match flipped. According to the WTA, Andreeva won 12 consecutive points to draw level at 4-4, took 20 of the following 23, and sealed the set with three aces in a row. In the second set she did not drop a point behind her first serve and conceded only two points on serve all set.
Sabalenka sounded as stunned as anyone. “I don’t even know how many games in a row I lost,” she said, before offering a one-word verdict on her opponent: “Bravo.”
Andreeva was harder on herself. Asked to rate the performance, she said she would give herself “a good eight,” adding that a 10 requires “the best match of your life.”
Records that came with the win
The scoreline matched her opener, a 6-4, 6-0 victory over Elina Svitolina. The WTA lists a string of firsts attached to the run:
- No one before her had opened a WTA Finals campaign with a bagel set in both of the first two matches.
- She is the youngest semifinalist at the event since Caroline Wozniacki in 2009.
- She is only the fifth teenager to reach the last four since the round-robin format began in 2003, after Maria Sharapova, Ana Ivanovic, Wozniacki and Coco Gauff.
The two players had not met for 605 days. Their previous meeting was the 2025 Indian Wells final, which Andreeva won from a set down to take the title over a then world No. 1 Sabalenka. The Belarusian returned to the same desert venue this spring and won it, part of her sweep of the Indian Wells and Miami “Sunshine Double.”
Counting the comeback
The arithmetic shows how lopsided the finish was. Andreeva won 12 of the 16 games played, including the last 11, and 45 of the final 55 points, which works out to about 82 percent. Before the turnaround, Sabalenka had won four of the first five games.
Andreeva arrived at the event with just one win over a top-10 opponent all year and has now added two in three days. She has collected multiple top-10 wins at a single tournament three times, and the first two times, at Dubai and Indian Wells in 2025, she went on to lift the trophy.
The run caps a big year. Andreeva, 19, won her first major at the 2026 French Open, the youngest champion in Paris since Monica Seles in 1992, and climbed to a career-high No. 3 in the rankings in October.
What comes next
Andreeva meets Karolina Muchova in the semifinals; she leads their tour head-to-head 1-0. Sabalenka is still alive: she plays Svitolina on Friday, November 13, with the second semifinal place from Group 2 on the line. Sabalenka has won six of their previous seven meetings.
For more tennis, see our story on Arthur Rinderknech losing a Masters final to his own cousin, and for more from the women’s game, Caitlin Clark’s deal with Dick’s Sporting Goods and Foot Locker.
Further reading
Image: Will Keightley, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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