Sunday, Jun 12, 2005
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LONDON: Andy Roddick overcame a mid-match slump on Saturday to beat Radek Stepanek of the Czech Republic 6-3, 2-6, 6-2 and advance to the Queen's Club final. Roddick saved two break points in his first service game and then broke Stepanek in the next. Stepanek broke Roddick in the second game of the second set as the American struggled with his serves and returns. The Czech then evened the match by breaking Roddick in the eighth game with a backhand winner. Roddick overcame his problems and took a 3-1 lead in the third, but missed a chance to break Stepanek again, when deuce was reached nine times. Roddick did break Stepanek in the seventh game for a 5-2 lead and won the match when Stepanek returned wide. ``I played some of my best tennis at the end,'' Roddick said. ``In the third set, I felt I returned a lot, lot better.'' Roddick, who has won 14 straight matches at Queen's, is bidding to join Lleyton Hewitt and John McEnroe as the only players to win three consecutive titles at the Wimbledon warmup.
Hewitt bows out
On Friday, top-seeded Lleyton Hewitt slumped 7-6(4), 6-3 against Ivo Karlovic of Croatia. Karlovic took just 69 minutes to earn a second career victory over Hewitt, who he beat in the first round of Wimbledon in 2003. Both players easily held serve in the opening set, before Karlovic took the tiebreaker when the ball clipped the net cord at 2-2 and sat up for him to hit a winner. That was enough to earn him the set, and he broke the Australian to love at 4-3 in the second.
Smooth run
At Halle, top-ranked Roger Federer beat Tommy Haas 6-4, 7-6(9) in the semifinals to come within one victory of capturing his third straight Gerry Weber Open title. Mahesh Bhupathi and his Australian partner Todd Woodbridge run into the Swede pair of Roger Federer and Yves Allegro in the men's doubles semifinal. The Bhupathi-Woodbridge duo got a walkover from the German pair of Nicolas Kiefer and Alexander Waske — the German who created a sensation by beating French Open champion Rafael Nadal in the first round of the singles event. Earlier, the Indo-Australian pair of Bhupathi and Woodbridge had beaten the Austrian duo of Julian Knowle and Jurgen Melzer 6-3, 6-4 to reach the second round. The winner of the Bhupathi-Woodbridge vs Federer-Allegro will meet Marat Safin and his Swede partner Joachim Johansson in the doubles final. The Safin-Johansson pair also got a walkover from the Jiri Novak-Petr Pala pair. By beating the seventh-seeded German, Federer extended his winning streak on grass to 28 matches, the second longest in the open era after Bjorn Borg's 41 in a row from 1976-81. Federer is using the euro680,000 ($800,000) Halle event to prepare for Wimbledon, where he will be seeking his third straight title. ``I played my best (match) of the week, and that's how you want to feel before Wimbledon,'' Federer said. ``I served very consistently, I got off to a quick start and I won my service games comfortably.'' The two-time defending champion fought off two set points in the tiebreaker and wasted two match points before overcoming Haas. The dramatic tiebreaker ended on an anticlimactic note, with Haas double-faulting. On his first match point, Federer hit a volley just long, on his second he put a backhand into the net. Federer fired an ace to gain his third match point and won after 1 hour, 37 minutes on Haas' double-fault. ``You get a little tense in the tiebreaker, because there is so much pressure one every point,'' Federer said. The victory raised Federer's record for the year to 50-3. His last loss was on clay in last week's French Open semifinals. For the second straight match, Federer was not broken and Haas won only three points on the Swiss star's serve in the first set.
The results: At Queen's Club (Stella Artois ATP championships): Semifinals: Andy Roddick bt Radek Stepanek 6-3, 2-6, 6-2. Quarterfinals: Ivo Karlovic bt Lleyton Hewitt 7-6(4), 6-3. At Halle: (Gerry Weber Open): Semifinals: Roger Federer bt Tommy Haas 6-4, 7-6(9). At Birmingham: (DFS Classic): Semifinals: Jelena Jankovic bt Laura Granville 6-2, 6-2; Maria Sharapova bt Tatiana Golovin 7-5, 6-1. Quarterfinals: Maria Sharapova bt Eleni Daniilidou 7-5, 2-6, 6-1; Tatiana Golovin bt Anna Chakvetadze 6-4, 7-6(3). — Agencies
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