Australia’s pairing of Lleyton Hewitt and Chris Guccione strolled past the Chinese duo of Gong Maoxin and Li Zhe in straight sets yesterday, giving the visitors a 2-1 lead in their Davis Cup Asia-Oceania Group 1 second-round match-up yesterday.
Guccione and Hewitt — a two-time Grand Slam winner — dispatched the Chinese pair 6-4, 6-4, 6-4 before a boisterous crowd at the Beijing International Tennis Center.
Hewitt, who made his Davis Cup debut in 1999, is Australia’s most successful Davis Cup player with a 36-9 record in singles and 8-3 record in doubles, but he has seen his ATP ranking slump to 173rd as he battles injury.
Photo: Reuters
The Australian win sets up today’s final day of single’s action, with Australia’s Marinko Matosevic facing off against Zhang Ze and Bernard Tomic meeting Wu Di.
On Friday, China’s 19-year-old Wu, who is ranked just 404th in the world, outlasted Matosevic in five sets for the hosts’ only win so far in the clash. Matosevic is ranked 141 in the world.
“The Chinese players are very disciplined, they are very tough and they make you beat them,” Australia coach Pat Rafter said. “I am very impressed with the way they went about it, they did a very good job.”
JAPAN VS UZBEKISTAN
AFP, KOBE, JAPAN
Japanese ace Kei Nishikori inspired his side to a 2-1 lead over Uzbekistan in the Davis Cup Asia-Oceania Group 1 second-round match up yesterday.
Nishikori teamed up with Go Soeda in the doubles in Kobe to beat Denis Istomin and Murad Inoyatov 7-5, 7-6 (7/5), 7-5 in the best-of-five contest.
Today will see Nishikori play Istomin and Ito take on Dustov.
NZ VS PHILIPPINES
AFP, WELLINGTON
New Zealand took an unbeatable 3-0 lead over the Philippines in their Asia-Oceania Group 1 Davis Cup match up when the debut pairing of Artem Sitak and Marcus Daniell won the vital doubles yesterday.
Rubin Statham and Michael Venus had cleaned up the opening singles on Friday when Statham beat Ruben Gonzales in straight sets, while Venus needed the full five sets to beat former top 100 player Cecil Mamiit.
Sitak, in his first Davis Cup match, then teamed up with Daniell to beat the experienced Mamiit and Gonzales 7-6 (7/0), 6-3, 6-2.
There were no service breaks in the first set, but the Kiwis proved invincible in the tie-break taking it 7-0 on a Mamiit double fault.
They then comfortably cruised through the next two sets to ensure New Zealand had won the relegation match, before today’s reverse singles.
“It’s the best day in my life, there’s no feeling like Davis Cup when you win like that,” said Russian-born Sitak, who was playing only his second game for New Zealand.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier