Indian ace tennis star Rohan Boppana has moved to the semi-finals of the 2023 US Open with his partner Matthew Edben after they defeated the American duo of Nathaniel Lammons and Jackson Withrow in straight sets 7-6 (10), 6-1, a match that lasted for an hour and 28 minutes.
Interestingly, the duo of Lammons and Withrow defeated one of the favourite pairings of Wesley Koolhof and Neal Skupski to progress to the quarter-finals but their journey came to an end with the defeat.
Bopanna and Ebden saved seven set points in the opening set and that created the difference between the two pairings. Losing the first set like that simply broke the morale of the American duo as Bopanna-Ebden crushed them in the second set to storm into the semifinals.
The veteran and his partner Ebden are the sixth seed and they had a very tough journey to the semi-finals. They defeated Australia’s Christopher O’Connell and Aleksandar Vukic in the opening round (6-4, 6-2) to start their campaign. They backed it up with a 6-3, 6-3 win over the Kazakh-Russia pairing of Andrey Golubev and Roman Safiullin. Their toughest test was in the round of 16 when they were up against All British pairing of Julian Cash and Henry Patten as they somehow eked out a victory 6-4, 6-7(5), 7-6(6).
The Indo-Australian pair has won two honours this season in Doha and Indian Wells and they also reached the summit clash in Rotterdam and Madrid. Interestingly, Boppana stares at history as he has an opportunity to play in the finals of the US Open in the men’s doubles category after 13 long years. The last time he featured in the US Open finals in men’s doubles was with Pakistani partner Aisam-ul-Haq Qureshi.
Therefore Bopanna and Ebden will look to overcome the challenge from the French duo of Nicolas Mahut and Pierre-Hughes Herbert in the semi-finals. The French pairing defeated Robert Galloway and Albano Olivetti in the quarter-finals 7-5, 6-4 to progress to the last four. In their journey, they knocked out two seeded pairings of Marcel Granollers and Horacio Zeballos (7-6(0), 4-6, 6-4) who were the eighth seed and the duo of Michael Venus and Jaime Murray (6-4, 6-4) who were the 12th seed. So it won’t be an easy challenge for Bopanna and Ebden.
