Hong Kong: Sania Mirza gets an opportunity to assess her form and recovery from a career threatening wrist injury when the Indian tennis star competes in World Team Challenge tournament, kicking off here Wednesday.

The event will also help the Indian ace prepare for the first Grand Slam of the year — the Australian Open — as the tournament features the big names of women’s tennis, including world No.1 Jelena Jankovic and multiple-Grand Slam winner American Venus Williams.

The event pits three top players from Europe, Russia, America and Asia-Pacific against each other.

Sania will represent Asia-Pacific along with team captain China’s Zheng Zie, who became the first player from her country to reach Wimbledon semi-finals last year, and local player Zhang Ling.

The tournament will kick off with a match between number one players from the Asia-Pacific zone and top seeds Russia represented by Zheng Jie and Vera Zvonareva respectively.

Sania as number two player of the team will play the second singles against her nemesis and world No.18 Ana Chakvetadze.

Sania has never won a match against Chakvetadze, who emerged winner in all their four meetings so far, including the third round of US Open in 2007.

Sania could play only 12 tournaments last year due to a wrist injury and was forced to skip the French Open and the US Open, which resulted in a fall in her rankings.

As per the format of the tournament, top two players from each team will compete in singles, while the third player called the ‘Star of Tomorrow’ competes in doubles along with one of the singles players.

The four teams are placed into a semi-final draw based on seedings determined by the combined WTA ranking of the two singles players from each team.

Each semi-final tie consists of two singles matches and one doubles match. The winners of the semi-finals will advance to the JB Gold Group Final and the losers to the JB Silver Group Final. The JB Silver Group Final also consists of 2 singles matches and 1 doubles match.

Teams

Europe: Jelena Jankovic (Srb), Agnes Szavay (Hun) and Michelle Larcher de Brito (Por).

Russia: Vera Zvonareva, Ana Chakvetadze and Alexandra Panova.

The Americas: Venus Williams (US), Gisela Dulko (Arg) and Coco Vandeweghe (US).

Asia-Pacific: Zheng Jie (Chn), Sania Mirza (Ind) and Zhang Ling (HKG). (PTI)