Simona Halep thumps US Open champion Flavia Pennetta at WTA Finals

She retired in the third set of her first match at Wuhan with a left wrist injury.

Ultimately, the third-seeded Sharapova relied on her flat strikes, forward movement (she won 22 of 29 net trips) and a couple of timely finesse shots to earn her first since win she defeated CoCo Vandeweghe in the Wimbledon quarterfinals in July.

She said: “I feel that I can play my best tennis here”. I can say that I didn’t play my best today, but I played good tennis. “I still have two matches to play, so we will see what happens”.

But it was those letdowns that led her to where she is at the moment – ranked No2 in the world (thanks to a semi-final showing at the US Open last month), seeded No1 at the WTA Finals, and a 6-0, 6-3 victor over Flavia Pennetta in her Singapore opener on Sunday. I played solid and was dominating the match. I’m happy I got through it. Yeah, I’m going to feel it tomorrow.

Simona Halep and Garbine Muguruza go into the WTA Finals as narrow favourites but the season climax is shaping as a survival of the fittest after a rash of injuries in recent weeks. She performed poorly on the hard courts with her best result being a quarterfinal run at the Rogers Cup in a match that ended up with one of the oddest scorelines of the year; she lost 0-6, 6-3, 6-1 to Simona Halep.

In fact, Kvitova and Radwanska are the only two players to participate in every WTA Final since 2011.

Radwanska recovered the break to reduce the deficit to 3-4 only to surrender her own serve again in the very next game and this time Sharapova needed no second invitation.

At the combined ATP and WTA event the 27-year-old Croat fired nine aces to win 6-4, 6-4 in one hour 28 minutes to chalk up his second win over Bautista Agut in as many meetings and to grab his season’s first and 14th career title.

That can, of course, prove a disadvantage for Radwanska as she has played an bad lot of tennis recently, putting a lot of strain on her often troublesome right shoulder in particular.

Pennetta, the reigning U.S. Open champion, is the only player in the entire field to hold a winning edge – 3-2 – over Sharapova.

According to the draw, the qualified eight players have been put in two groups – Red and White.

Pennetta, who is playing her final tournament before retiring, said: “She was playing really well today”.

“Maybe I had not too much energy”, said the 33-year-old.