World No 1 Serena Williams rallied past third seed Simona Halep 6-3, 7-6 (7/5) to claim her second straight trophy in the Cincinnati WTA tournament on Sunday night.

Williams, who will be bidding for history at the US Open as she attempts to complete a rare calendar-year Grand Slam singles sweep, came back from an early first-set deficit to take charge against Halep.

Williams was playing her third consecutive Cincinnati final and she claimed her fifth title of 2015. After a slow start, the world No 1 began to dominate her Romanian rival by winning five straight games to take the opening set.

Halep, the world No 3, again showed her abilities early in the second when earning three break points in the opening game, but Williams rescued each.

Though the second set proved more even than the first, it was Halep who was rescuing match points in the tie-break before the inevitable happened and Williams, having played her finest tennis of the week, secured her latest victory.

Meanwhile, Daniel Nestor and Edouard Roger-Vasselin won their first title together, registering a 6-2, 6-2 victory over Marcin Matkowski and Nenad Zimonjic.

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It was Nestor’s record-tying fifth doubles crown at Cincinnati. The 42-year-old’s previous win there came in 2009 with Zimonjic, his opponent in the final on Sunday. Nestor and Roger-Vasselin faced no break points while they broke their sixth-seeded opponents four times.

In all, they won 67 per cent of the points on the Grandstand court. The two earned 1000 ATP Tour ranking points. The win will put the duo back in the top 20 in the doubles rankings; Nestor began the week at No 25, Roger-Vasselin at No 23.

“It’s been two great weeks with you. This is the first time I beat the Bryans and I won a Masters, so obviously it’s thanks to you,” Roger-Vasselin said about his partner after the match.

In the women’s doubles final, sister duo Hao-Ching Chan and Yung-Jan Chan of Chinese Taipei earned a 7-5, 6-4 win against fourth-seeded Casey Dellacqua and Yaroslava Shvedova.