Taiwan’s top tennis player, Lu Yen-hsun, beat Matthias Bachinger of Germany 7-5, 7-6 (7/4) on Tuesday to advance to the second round of the ATP Atlanta Tennis Championships.
Lu said after clinching his first victory of the summer hard-court season that he lost his rhythm on serve in the first set after being called for a foot fault and he needed time to get it back.
However, he managed to stay on serve and then broke Bachinger at 5-5 when the German made some errors of his own, before serving out the first set.
Photo: EPA
Lu quickly fell behind in the second set 3-0, but staged a comeback and emerged victorious in the tiebreaker to take the match.
Now ranked 85th in the world after spending the past year fluctuating between 33rd and 57th, Lu is hoping to move back into the top 50 with a strong summer in the US, culminating with the final Grand Slam of the year, the US Open, late next month.
Despite his close call on Tuesday, Lu said that aside from the problems on his serve, he felt good about his groundstrokes and service return, and was able to control the flow of the match.
The win was his first ATP victory of the season from six starts. His next opponent will be qualifier Marinko Matisevic of Australia.
Davis Cup teammates Matosevic and Lleyton Hewitt led an Aussie assault on Tuesday as the unseeded pair gate-crashed into the second round of the championships.
Former No. 1 Hewitt connected on a superlative 89 percent of his first-serve points (25 of 28) in a 6-4, 6-4 crushing of American qualifier Phillip Simmonds. Matosevic, ranked 69th and a first-round Wimbledon victim, upset Russian sixth seed Igor Kunitsyn 6-7 (3/7), 6-2, 7-5.
Hewitt, the 30-year-old former No. 1 and two-time Grand Slam winner now dependent on wild cards after his ranking sunk to 174th, is coming back strong from his spring foot surgery, which came in the wake of a pair of hip operations in recent years.
He is playing at his lowest ranking since March 9, 1998, during his first full year on the ATP. He now stands 9-7 on the season.
“The ball was bouncing very high due to the heat,” the winner said. “It was tough to control and it took awhile to get used to things. I served smarter as the match went on, that made things a bit easier for me.”
Hewitt, with 28 career titles, is playing a full hard-court schedule this season prior to the US Open, and hoping for free entries into Masters 1000 events in Montreal and Cincinnati next month based upon past performance. If he cannot make a substantial rise over the next month, the 2001 winner could possibly find himself playing qualifying if a New York wild card does not materialize. Hewitt next takes on Rajeev Ram of the US, who upset Bulgarian fifth seed Gregor Dimitrov 6-4, 6-4.
In other results to complete the opening round, 19-year-old Ryan Harrison — youngest player in the field — put out Japan’s Yuichi Sugita 6-1, 7-6 (7/5), while Robby Ginepri won his first match since last August following a mountain bike crash caused by a squirrel, defeating former No. 2 Tommy Haas 6-4, 7-5.
The German is making a comeback from hip surgery and was seeking a second win of the season after returning to the courts at the French Open.
Holder Mardy Fish was to begin yesterday against Nicolas Mahut after the Frenchman beat Richard Berankis of Lithuania 7-6 (7/5), 6-2.
GERMAN OPEN
AFP, HAMBURG, GERMANY
Andrey -Golubev of Kazakhstan, the defending champion, and Spanish clay court ace Juan Carlos Ferrero both fell at the first hurdle to German challengers at the German Open in Hamburg on Tuesday.
Last weekend’s Stuttgart winner Ferrero fell 6-3, 6-2 to German wild-card Cedrik-Marcel Stebe, while Golubev, a surprise winner at the tournament last year, crashed out 7-5, 6-3 in his first-round match to Philipp Kohlschreiber.
“It was a tough match,” said Kohlschreiber, who converted four of his 10 break point chances. “I knew he didn’t win so many matches this year, but of course if you feel great at a place like here — you’re the winner from last year — you always know you can play very good. I knew he was very dangerous today.”
Stebe, ranked just 168th, made light work of former world No. 1 Ferrero, who had marked his return from injury by winning on the same surface in Stuttgart on Sunday.
At 20 years, Stebe is the youngest competitor in the tournament and is next set for a rematch with Russian Nikolay Davydenko, who beat him in a three-setter in the first round in Stuttgart last week.
Pablo Andujar, losing finalist in Stuttgart, beat Julien Benneteau of France 6-2, 6-2.
Radek Stepanek, the 2006 -runner-up to Tommy Robredo, saved all four break points he faced and hit eight aces past German wild-card Andreas Beck for a 7-5, 7-6 (7/2) win.
Argentine Juan Monaco achieved his 15th win in 17 matches on clay this season, beating Italian qualifier Simone Bolelli 6-3, 7-5.
In second-round action, German wild-card Tobias Kamke, ranked 90th, ousted seventh-seeded Argentine Juan Ignacio Chela 6-1, 6-4.
French fifth seed Gilles Simon advanced to the third round beating Ukrainian qualifier Sergiy Stakhovsky 6-2, 6-1, along with Jarkko Nieminen, who beat another Ukrainian, 10th seed Alexandr Dolgopolov, 6-3, 1-6, 6-4.
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