John Millman scored a milestone win at the Winston-Salem Open on Thursday, downing top seed Richard Gasquet 7-5, 6-3 to move into his maiden ATP World Tour semi-final. The 92-minute win also marked the first time Millman has beaten a player in the Top 15 of the Emirates ATP Rankings. The Aussie, who reached a career-best No. 60 in the Emirates ATP Rankings in May, is currently ranked No. 81.
“No matter what level, every tournament I go in to compete, to do my best and to win,” said Millman, who is taking part in the event for the first time. “To be honest, at the start of the week I was a bit busted physically because of the long weeks at the Olympics and in Cincinnati. But now I’m moving great and I’m hitting the ball really well. It’s a treat to be here. The conditions are great and suit my game well.
“Gasquet is a top player. Playing and beating him is very satisfying. Every week that I’m playing an ATP World Tour event, I gain more confidence that I can compete at this level, and I’m proud of that,” the 27-year-old Millman, who broke the Frenchman five times during the match, said. “Everyone remaining in the tournament is an accomplished player. Every win is a bonus for me right now.”
Millman will next face Pablo Carreno Busta, who topped Andrey Kuznetsov 6-4, 6-3. The Spaniard fired nine aces and saved all seven break points faced to advance in 85 minutes. Millman beat Carreno Busta in the first round of the ATP World Tour Masters 1000 event in Miami earlier this year. It was the pair’s lone previous FedEx ATP Head2Head meeting.
No. 2 seed Roberto Bautista Agut is safely through to the semi-finals after beating Yen-Hsun Lu 6-3, 6-2. Bautista Agut did not face a break point in the 61-minute win and broke Lu three times. The Spaniard improved to 3-0 in the pair’s FedEx ATP Head2Head rivalry and has yet to drop a set against the man from Chinese Taipei. The 28 year old is seeking a third ATP World Tour title in 2016, having prevailed in Auckland and in Sofia.
Bautista Agut will meet ninth seed Viktor Troicki in the semi-finals after the Serbian battled for nearly two hours to edge Bautista Agut’s countryman Fernando Verdasco. Ninth seed Troicki extended his FedEx ATP Head2Head record against the No. 15 seed to 2-0 with a 6-4, 3-6, 6-4 victory.
Troicki had snapped a five-match losing streak with his second-round win over Kyle Edmund before sending No. 6 Sam Querrey packing. Against Verdasco, he won 85 per cent of first-serve points and twice recovered from a break down in the deciding set before breaking to seal the result on his second match point.
It marks his third ATP World Tour semi-final of the season and his first since losing the final in Sofia to Bautista Agut in February.
“For the first set and a half I think I had the match under control. I think I played pretty good then my serve disappeared for a while,” Troicki said of his quarter-final. “He raised his game, my game when down a little. The start of the third set, I think, was good tennis.
“From the middle of the third set it was very weird. I don’t know what was going on. When I served he just returned everything at full power and then on his serve he lost it a bit. He gave me a lot of presents. I’ll take it, I’m happy to be in the semis.”
In doubles, the German-Indian pairing of Andre Begemann and Leander Paes upset top seeds Lukasz Kubot and Nenad Zimonjic to reach the semi-finals. The unseeded duo won 79 per cent of first-serve points against the Polish-Serbian tandem in a 6-4, 6-4 victory.
They will meet third seeds Robert Lindstedt and Aisam-Ul-Haq Qureshi after the Swedish-Pakistani pair narrowly held off Croatian-British duo Marin Draganja and Dominic Inglot. The No. 3 seeds held a match point at 5-4 in the second set and managed to fight off three set points before conceding the tie-break 7/4. They clinched the match tie-break on their first opportunity to wrap it up in two hours and 13 minutes.
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