Taiwanese ninth seed Lu Yen-hsun cruised into the quarter-finals of the Winston-Salem Open on Wednesday after a comprehensive 6-1, 6-2 defeat of Spain’s Marcel Granollers.
The Taiwanese No. 1 faced no break-point chances against his eighth-seeded opponent and converted four of nine to complete the victory in 1 hour, 5 minutes.
World No. 38 Lu, who won 60 of the 99 points played in the third-round match, was due to face world No. 48 Andreas Seppi in the quarter-finals yesterday.
Photo: AFP
The Taiwanese has lost two of his previous three meetings with the Italian, but he did beat Seppi 7-5, 1-6, 6-4 in their last encounter in the round-of-32 at the Open de Nice Cote d’Azur last year.
Fourteenth seed Seppi set up the quarter-final clash by beating Frenchman Nicolas Mahut 6-4, 7-6 (9/7) on Wednesday.
Like Lu, the US’ John Isner also made short work of his third-round match, beating Kazakhstan’s Mikhail Kukushkin 6-1, 7-6 (7/3).
Top seed and two-time champion Isner 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,” Isner said. “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 more than 2m-tall American 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 Kazakhstani player.
“I was putting a lot of pressure on him and doing the right things, but I got away from that a little bit,” Isner said.
Isner, 12-0 all-time in the tournament, was to face seventh-seeded Lukas Rosol of the Czech Republic yesterday. Rosol advanced with a 1-6, 6-2, 6-2 victory over 10th-seeded Pedro Andujar of Spain.
Also advancing were the US’ Sam Querrey, fifth-seeded Guillermo Garcia-Lopez of Spain, Belgian qualifier David Goffin and Poland’s Jerzy Janowicz.
Querrey will play Garcia-Lopez in one quarter-final match at the Wake Forest Tennis Center, with Goffin set to taek on Janowicz.
Earlier, 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 straight points to advance to an ATP tournament quarter-final for the sixth time this year.
“The last mon losing a lot of tiebreakers,” said Garcia-Lopez, who won his third career ATP Tour title in April last year in Morocco. “But at the end today, I got lucky.”
In other third-round matches, Querrey beat second seed Kevin Anderson of South Africa 7-6 (7-4), 6-4; Goffin extended his winning run to 25 straight by beating 15th-seeded Jarkko Nieminen of Finland 6-4, 4-6, 6-4; and Janowicz downed 12th-seeded Edouard Roger-Vasselin of France 4-6, 6-3, 6-4.
Meanwhile, in the first round of qualifying at the US Open, Taiwan’s Jimmy Wang saved a match point in a marathon second-set tiebreak to oust Daniel Evans 4-6, 7-6 (11/9), 6-2 in 2 hours, 32 minutes.
The 29-year-old Taiwanese said his legs were seizing with cramps as the match reached its conclusion.
“I feel tired, I feel heavy, [but] I feel excited,” Wang, who upset Ivo Karlovic in his lone main-draw victory at the US Open in 2012, told the ATP Tour Web site. “All these feelings. I’m just glad I clawed in the last set.”
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