Both Leander Paes and Rohan Bopanna lost their respective semi-final matches after fighting a tough battle with their rivals. With this, Indian challenge in the men’s doubles competition of the Wimbledon 2013 concluded on Thursday.
Initially, Bopanna and his French partner Edouard Roger-Vasselin gave the terrifying US pair of Mike and Bob Bryan a scare, but later lost by 6-7 (4-7) 6-4 6-3 5-7 6-3 in a battle that lasted for 2 hours and 48 minutes.
Paes and his Cezch partner Radek Stepanek were ousted by 12th seeds Ivan Dodig of Croatia and Marcelo Melo of Brazil. Actually, the Croat-Brazilian duo won by 3-6 6-4 6-1 3-6 6-3 after 2 hours and 55 minutes battle. Initially, both Paes and Stepanek started off well winning a break of serve and finishing up the first set in 35 minutes. Subsequently, the second set was also evenly contested for around 46 minutes in which Dodig-Melo won with a break of serve. Further, the winners broke the serve of the veteran Indo-Czech partnership thrice in the third game to win the set by 6-1 in only 22 minutes. However, Paes and Stepanek returned by winning the fourth in just over half an hour to control the proceedings.
Bopanna and his partner’s loss was due to inexperience of not playing too many Grand Slam semi-finals. On the other side, Paes and Stepanek with a cumulative age of nearly 75 years couldn’t cope up with their much younger rivals.
Sania Mirza’s unimpressive campaign at the Wimbledon concluded as she and her Romanian partner Horia Tecau lost to eighth seeds Daniel Nestor of Canada and Kristina Mladenovic of France in two-break sets in the mixed doubles quarter-final.
Nestor and Mladenovic won by 7-6 (7-5) 7-6 (7-5) with Mirza making a number of unforced errors during the second tie-breaker which ruined them in the match. In fact, Mirza and Tecau broke their opposition’s serve in the second set just to lose the initiative and couldn’t compensate later on. Dismally, Mirza’s service was a problem as Nestor repeatedly assaulted her second serve. Perceptibly, the 20-year-old Mladenovic’s net play was far better than her much senior Indian opponent.
Rohan Bopanna and his partner Jie Zheng of China lost their mixed doubles quarter-final match to Jean-Julien Rojer of Netherlands and Vera Dushevina of Russia in a close three-set encounter today. The Dutch-Russian duo thrashed the Indo-Chinese combo by 6-3 3-6 6-3. Overall, the seventh seeded Asian combo lost the first set, but managed to return in the second only to disappoint in the last set of the match.
