Melbourne, Jan 23: Ace Indian tennis players Sania Mirza and Rohan Bopanna sailed into the mixed doubles quarter-finals of the Australian Open here on Monday.
The Indian pair defeated Japan’s Makoto Ninomiya and Uruguay’s Ariel Behar 6-4, 7-6(11-9) in their second-round match to set up a quarterfinal clash with Latvian-Spanish duo Jelena Ostapenko and David Vega Hernandez.
Sania and Bopanna, the Rio Olympic semi-finalists, had earlier beaten Australia’s Jaimee Fourlis and Luke Saville in the first round.
The Indian pair drew first blood and broke the Uruguay-Latvian pair in the third game but the Ninomiya-Behar responded immediately to level the score. But the Indians then make it 4-3 and quickly raced to a set lead.
Both the pairs went toe-to-toe in the second as the hard-fought set ended with the Indian pair triumphing 11-9 in the tie-breaker, keeping the Indian challenge alive at the year’s first Grand Slam.
Sania is playing her last Grand Slam as the six-time Grand Slam champion earlier this month announced that she will retire from professional tennis at Dubai Tennis Championships, a WTA 1000 event, which begins on February 19.
In the women’s doubles, Sania and her Kazakh partner Anna Danilina ended their Australian Open campaign after suffering a loss at the hands of the Ukrainian-Belgian duo of Alison Van Uytvanck and Anhelina Kalinina in the second-round on Sunday.
In the men’s doubles, Bopanna and his Australian partner Matthew Ebden too crashed out of the tournament on Friday after their first round loss.
Another India pair, N Sriram Balaji and Jeevan Nedunchezhiyan, who entered the Australian Open as an alternate pair, also bowed out after suffering a 4-6, 4-6 loss against Frenchmen Jeremy Chardy and Fabrice Martin in the second round, ending India’s challenge in men’s doubles on Sunday. (IANS)
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