American John Isner made short work of his third-round match on Wednesday in the Winston-Salem Open, beating Kazakhstan's Mikhail Kukushkin 6-1, 7-6 (7-3).
Isner, the tournament's top seed and two-time champion, served 17 aces and needed just 68 minutes to oust the 13th-seeded Kukushkin in the final tuneup for next week's US Open.
"It could've gone a lot quicker," said Isner, who was born in nearby Greensboro, NC "I made it tough on myself, which I'm not too pleased about because of how I was serving. Still, I played well at the end of the match and I'm off in straight sets again, which is nice."
The 6-foot-10 Isner broke Kukushkin's serve twice and won nearly three-quarters of all points played in the first set, which he completed in just 18 minutes.
However, Isner had a tougher time in the second set. While he served 12 aces, he also struggled to finish points against the smaller Kukushkin.
"I was putting a lot of pressure on him, and doing the right things," Isner said. "But I got away from that a little bit. Of course, he changed his tactics up, and certainly played better in the second set. It got away from me there a little bit, but I played well at the end."
Isner, 12-0 all-time in the tournament, will face seventh-seeded Lukas Rosol of the Czech Republic in Thursday's semi-finals. Rosol advanced with a 1-6, 6-2, 6-2 victory over 10th-seeded Pedro Andujar of Spain.
Also advancing to the quarter-finals were American Sam Querrey, fifth-seeded Guillermo Garcia-Lopez of Spain, Belgian qualifier David Goffin, Poland's Jerzy Janowicz, ninth-seeded Yen-Hsun Lu of Taiwan and 14th-seeded Andreas Seppi of Italy.
Querrey will play Garcia-Lopez in one quarter-final match at the Wake Forest Tennis Center. The other pairings have Goffin facing Janowicz and Lu taking on Seppi.
In earlier matches, Garcia-Lopez battled through a third-set tiebreaker before beating 11th-seeded Donald Young of the US 6-7 (4-7), 6-3, 7-6 (8-6).
Garcia-Lopez overcame a 6-4 deficit in the third tiebreaker by winning four consecutive points to advance to an ATP tournament quarter-final for the sixth time this year.
"The last month in Europe on the clay courts, I was losing a lot of tiebreakers," said Garcia-Lopez, who won his third career ATP Tour title last April in Morocco.
"But at the end today, I got lucky. Sometimes the tiebreaker is a lottery, and I got the number. That's why I won."
In other third-round matches, Querrey defeated second-seeded Kevin Anderson of South Africa 7-6 (7-4), 6-4; Goffin extended his winning streak to 25 consecutive matches by beating 15th-seeded Jarkko Nieminen of Finland 6-4, 4-6, 6-4; Janowicz downed 12th-seeded Edouard Roger-Vasselin of France 4-6, 6-3, 6-4; Lu beat No. 8 seed Marcel Gransllers of Spain 6-1, 6-2; and Seppi defeated France's Nicolas Mahut 6-4, 7-6 (9-7).
Comments
0 comment