Top seed and defending champion Rafael Nadal slumped out of the ATP Rio Open on Saturday, losing his semi-final to Italian Fabio Fognini in three sets.
Fognini, who had lost his four previous meetings with the 14-time grand slam champion, won 1-6, 6-2, 7-5 to advance to yesterday’s final against Spaniard David Ferrer.
Second seed Ferrer reached the trophy match with a 7-5, 6-1 win over Austrian Andreas Haider-Maurer.
Photo: EPA
Nadal, who only came off court at 3:30am after his quarter-final win over Uruguayan Pablo Cuevas, was visibly fatigued, allowing his early momentum to slip as he crashed out after 2 hours, 17 minutes.
“I am very pleased as I played the best in the world on this surface,” fourth seed Fognini said.
Nadal came to Brazil on the back of a poor start to the year after a first-round exit in Qatar and a quarter-final loss at the Australian Open.
Nadal was furious after he was forced into a late-night start on Friday with all four quarter-finals played on center court and all going the distance.
Fognini’s last eight meeting with Argentine Federico Delbonis lasted more than three hours before the Australian Open doubles champion alongside compatriot Simone Bolelli emerged a 6-4, 6-7, 7-6 winner.
It was the Italian’s fatigue which showed early on as Nadal blitzed him in the opening set, and an early break in the second looked as if the titleholder would emerge victorious.
Instead, a double fault allowed Fognini a toehold. He threw that one away in missing a simple volley, but thereafter the momentum swung inexorably his way with a trio of breaks seeing the Italian level matters.
Nadal tried to dig his way out of trouble in the decider, but he began to run out of juice as Fognini took the honors on his third match point.
The women’s final was set to see 16th-ranked Italian Sara Errani, the top seed, take on 75th-ranked Slovak Anna Schmiedlova yesterday.
OPEN 13
Local favorite Gael Monfils maintained his perfect record against fourth-seeded Roberto Bautista Agut of Spain to reach the final of the Open 13 where he was scheduled to play fellow Frenchman Gilles Simon yesterday.
The seventh-seeded Monfils, who also beat the Spaniard in the second round last week in Rotterdam, put Bautista Agut under pressure with excellent return games, and converted four of his five break points to produce an easy 6-4, 6-2 win on Saturday.
Simon took a slower start against Sergiy Stakhovsky of Ukraine and rallied to a 3-6, 6-3, 6-2 victory after hitting nine aces.
It will be the first all-French final in the coastal city since Jo-Wilfried Tsonga defeated Michael Llodra six years ago.
DUBAI CHAMPIONSHIPS
Top-seeded Simona Halep earned her second title of the year by beating 17th-seeded Karolina Pliskova 6-4, 7-6(4) in the Dubai Championships final on Saturday.
Pliskova surrendered her serve in the seventh game of the first set at love to give Halep the needed advantage for the set.
The Czech, who started the second set with a 2-0 lead, took an off-court medical timeout for a left hip issue after losing the advantage.
In all, there were eight service breaks leading into the second-set tiebreaker.
In the second set, Halep served for the match twice, failing to take advantage of a match point in the 10th and 12th games.
At 4-4 in the tiebreaker, Halep won the final three points of the match. She took her third match point with a forehand winner into an open court.
DELRAY BEACH OPEN
Ivo Karlovic of Croatia was scheduled to play American Donald Young in yesterday’s Delray Beach Open final in Florida.
Fourth seed Karlovic moved closer to his sixth ATP title when he made quick work of Frenchman Adrian Mannarino with a straight sets semi-final victory on Saturday.
The 35-year-old pounded 17 aces and broke serve once in each set to triumph 6-3, 6-4 on the outdoor hard-court.
The unseeded Young exerted considerably more energy in the other semi-final, edging Australian Bernard Tomic 4-6, 6-4, 6-2 in nearly two hours.
Doping fears prevented former US Open champion Emma Raducanu from treating insect bites on the eve of the Australian Open, she said, with players increasingly wary about ingesting contaminated substances. The British player was speaking in the wake of high-profile doping cases involving Iga Swiatak and Jannik Sinner. “I would say all of us are probably quite sensitive to what we take on board, what we use,” the 22-year-old said, recalling an incident on Friday. “I got really badly bitten by, I don’t know what, like ants, mosquitoes, something. I’m allergic, I guess,” she added. The bites “flared up and swelled up really a
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