It has been reported that Leander Paes and Radek Stepanek, struggled to enter the men's doubles quarterfinals while Sania Mirza and Jie Zheng comfortably booked a berth in the women's doubles last-eight stage in US Open at New York on Sunday.
Paes and his Czech partner, who is seeded fourth, had to toil for two hours and 12 minutes to overpower 14th seeded veteran French combo Michael Llodra and Nicolas Mahut by 7-5 4-6 6-3.
Subsequently, Paes and Stepanek may face Divij Sharan of India and his Taipei partner Yen-Hsun Lu. The pair hammered the Israeli partners Jonathan Erlich and Andy Ram by 6-4 5-7 7-6 (2) in a well struggled contest. Further, Divij and Lu have a tough match as they clash with Aisam-ul-Haq Qureshi of Pakistan and Jean-Julien Rojer of Netherlands. Remarkably, this partnership is seeded fifth in the season's final Grand Slam. If Divij and Lu win this match, they will encounter Paes and Stepanek in the quarters.
On the other side, Rohan Bopanna's US Open campaign too came to an end in the pre-quarters. The sixth seed Indian plus his partner Edouard Roger-Vasselin were knocked out by 4-6, 4-6 by Colin Fleming and Jonathan Marray of Great Britain.
Notably, Sania and Zheng of China, who is seeded 10th, got the better of sixth seeds Anna-Lena Groenefeld of Germany and Kveta Peschke of Czech Republic by 6-2 6-3 within 1 hour and 12 minutes. Both Sania and Zheng never faced any break point in the whole match. The duo broke their opponents twice in each set to jump to the last-eight.
It was observed that in the Paes-Stepanek match, after trading breaks, the commencing set was on serve till the 11th game. In fact, the Indo-Czech combo had their first set point in the subsequent game but Stepanek struck a forehand into the net. Moreover, he made up for it with a torrent to haul the 3rd set point, which they changed to shoot ahead. However, it wasn't a good start to the 2nd set for Paes and Stepanek as they were off by two break points in the 1st game. Although, Stepanek served well to save both, the second one was an ace. In addition, the fourth seeds had their first break chance in the next game but Paes failed to return Llodra's serve. However, Paes was broken in the seventh game while Llodra served out the set to level the match.
It cannot be ignored that the enthusiastically fought third set turned in Paes-Stepanek favor when they received a break of serve following Mahut netted. Ultimately, Llodra struck one long to hand Paes and Stepanek two match points as Paes concluded it with an ace.
