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Paes/Bhupathi in last eight of U.S. Open

Shailesh Soni

The top seeded Indian pair of Leander Paes and Mahesh Bhupathi entered the quarter-finals of the U.S. Open Tennis championships yesterday, beating the 15th seeds Justin Gimelstob and Riche Reneberg, 2-6, 6-4, 6-3.

They face the unseeded pair of Ben Ellwood and Michael Tebbut in the quarter-finals today.

The first set started with Bhupathi and Gimelstob holding their opening serves at love each. But then Paes dropped his serve at 15-40 to go down 1-2, and in the next service game Bhupathi also dropped serve at 15-40 as the Indians slid 1-4, down two breaks. They lost the set 2-6 immediately and looked in real trouble.

In the second set, Bhupathi was again down 0-30 in the first game, at which point he fired an ace, and the Indians suddenly found their rythmn. They started holding serves and waited for their opponents to make mistakes. Finally, in game 8, they managed to take Reneberg to a duece, but there was no break chance. At this moment, for the first time in the match some self-doubts must have crept into the American pair with the Indians serving well and not giving many points off their own serves either. Then in the 10th game, Gimelstob was down 15-40 quickly, and the 'Indian Express' steamed through the first break chance at set point and it was all evened up at 2-6, 6-4.

In the third set, the pressure was on Gimelstob and Reneberg. They had two break chances off Paes's serve in game three at 30-40 and then advantage out, but couldn't convert them. Paes went on to hold serve to make it 2-1. Both the teams kept winning their serves till the opening for the Indians came in the eighth game when Reneberg was down to 0-30. At 30-40 the Indians converted their second break chance of the match. Next, Bhuapthi held his serve after going 30-30, and proceded to wrap up the set and match.

It took an hour and 30 minutes for the Indians to finish it off and enter their fourth consecutive Grand Slam quarter-final this year.

Statistically, the Indians could only win 13 points as compared to 26 by the Americans in the first set and at the end of the match it was 69 to 72 points. Even in break chances, the Indians had just two as compared to five for the other guys. The Indians served two aces while the Americans eight, an unusually high number for doubles.

In the other quarter-final matches, sixth seeds Wayne Black/Sandon Stolle will face Andrei Olhovskiy/David Prinosil; third seeds Todd Woodbridge/Mark Woodforde will face 11th seeds Sebastien Lareau/Alex O'Brien and the seventh seeds Jonas Bjorkman/Byron Black will face Jeff Coetzee/Brent Haygarth.

Bhupathi returned to the courts after a couple of hours for his second round mixed doubles match which turned out to be easier than he may have expected, as Rachel McQuillan and Andrew Florent conceded the match at 4-1.

The match lasted only 17 minutes. Bhupathi/Sugiyama had broken both McQuillan/Florent in games 3 and 5 before the Auatralians retired from the match due to some injury.

In the quarter-finals, Bhupathi and Sugiyama will face the eighth seeded pair of Mary Pierce and John De Jager today.

Earlier, the top seed pair of Leander Paes amd Lisa Raymond lost to the unseeded American pair of Kimberly Po/Donald Johnson 6-4, 3-6, 4-6 in the second round.