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Rohan Bopanna keeps flying the Indian Tricolour high at the US Open 2018 as he made it to the men’s doubles quarter-finals of the final Slam of the season in New York on Monday. The 38-year-old Indian, who has teamed up with France’s Edouard Roger-Vasselin, dropped a set but recovered in time to register a 7-6(6), 4-6, 6-3 win over the all-French pair of Jeremy Chardy and Fabrice Martin.
Chardy and Martin were the more aggressive pair, producing 43 winners to Bopanna and Roger-Vasselin’s 37. But they also undid the good work with a smattering of 31 unforced errors while the 15th seeded Indo-French combine kept it relatively cleaner at just 20.
The Frenchmen were the better team even in terms of break point conversion as they managed to find success twice from the three break points they bagged. Bopanna and Roger-Vasselin, in contrast, could convert only two out of the seven break points they got.
Five of those break points came in the first set for the 15th seeds. With the two pairs trading a break of serve each, the set went to a tie-break, which Bopanna and Roger-Vasselin won.
Martin and Chardy made a strong comeback in the second set and did not allow the seeded pair to have even a single break point. The Indo-French pair inflicted the same kind of damage with their serves in the decider and closed out the win in 2 hours 1 minute to set up a quarter-final clash with the fifth seeds and 2018 Australian Open runners-up Juan Sebastian Cabal and Robert Farah.
Bopanna is now the last Indian standing at the US Open after the early losses suffered by Divij Sharan, Purav Raja, Leander Paes and Jeevan Nedunchezhiyan. Bopanna himself suffered a first round loss in mixed doubles, where he and Laura Siegemund went down 4-6, 4-6 to the seventh seeds Katarina Srebotnik and Michael Venus.
The Indian ace had been out of action for a while since the Wimbledon Championships due to a pinched nerve. It was only at the Asian Games that he returned and went on to win the men’s doubles gold medal alongside Sharan.
