By Etienne Stekelenburg
March 19 2005

Top ranked Lindsay Davenport and unseeded Kim Clijsters advance to the Pacific Life Open final. Davenport humiliates Maria Sharapova with double bagel fashion and Clijsters beats Elena Dementieva who suffered a right hip strain in the second set 6-4, 6-2.

Belgian Kim Clijsters will meet top seed Lindsay Davenport of the USA in her first title match since thirteen months. She started her comeback in Antwerp where she was pleased with the way she played after such a long time out of serious competition. She didn’t play most of the previous season but was eager to play at the tournament of Hasselt, Belgium last year that ended her season and kept her from starting in Australia.

Elena Dementieva was moving well in the first set but lost 6-4. In the second set the Russian did ask for a medical timeout and left the court with the trainer. She came back with a bandage around her thigh but she was not able to come back from trailing 3-1.

Coming back from the treatment Dementieva took her game for 3-2 but Clijsters took the following games ending the match 6-4, 6-2 in 1 hour and 13 minutes.

Clijsters leads the head-to-head against the 23-year-old Dementieva 6-1, who defeated Clijsters in 2000 for the last time.

"This is the happiest I have been to be in the final," said Clijsters, who won the 2003 edition of the Pacific Life Open. "In 2003 it was great, but you don't know how much it means until you haven't had it for a while."

Top seed Lindsay Davenport reached the final by humiliating Russian Wimbledon champion Maria Sharapova. In 49 minutes Sharapova walked towards the net to shake hands with the one who just beat her 6-0, 6-0. She had never had a double bagel loss before in her young tennis career. The 17-year-old still is leading their head-to-head 2-1 after losing the lopsided match.

"There are days when I go out on the court and I feel like I can't miss a ball," said Sharapova. "Today was just one of those days when you're playing terrible and she's just hitting every single ball as hard as she can, on the line."

Davenport said: "It was kind of a weird sensation, an odd position to be in, to win a match against such a good player and not have lost a game."