By Matthew Marolf
In the day’s most pronounced upset, third-seeded Reilly Opelka was eliminated by qualifier Jason Jung 5-7, 6-4, 6-4.
Friday’s play commenced with the only quarterfinal between seeded players, featuring two ATP Next Gen stars. 21-year-old Frenchman Ugo Humbert started the year by winning his first ATP title in Auckland. Today he faced 20-year-old Serbian Miomir Kecmanovic, vying to reach his second semi-final of the year after first doing so in Doha.
In the first set, Humbert won 94% of first serve points (15/16), easily holding his five service games in the set with no break points faced. The Frenchman displayed some excellent service placement, using the serve to gain an immediate advantage in rallies. The lefty consistently hit deep groundstrokes, occasionally mixing in short angles to catch Kecmanovic off-guard.
In the fourth game of the second set, Humbert started missing his first serves, an opening Kecmanovic pounced on, converting his first break point of the match to secure the lead. Miomir would break again at 5-2 as Ugo’s groundies began misfiring. Kecmanovic claimed the second set 6-2.
At 3-3 in the third, Humbert earned two break points, but failed to secure either. Kecmanovic garnered a break point of his own in the next game, which Humbert erased with a scorching forehand winner. But in Ugo’s next service game at 4-5, Miomir broke at love with some stellar hitting off both sides, giving himself a 3-6, 6-2, 6-4 comeback victory.
When asked how he turned the match around, Kecmanovic said, “I don’t think I really changed anything… I just stayed solid the whole time. I just tried to get that one more ball back every time,” said Miomir.
In Saturday’s semi-finals, Kecmanovic will face another man who came back from a set down to win 3-6, 6-2, 7-6(5). Kyle Edmund outlasted South Korea’s Soonwoo Kwon in a third set tiebreak, with Kwon double faulting down match point. Edmund went up a quick break in the first, but was then broken three times later in the set. For the Brit, cleaning up his play to start the second set was key.
“In the second set, I forced myself to get on top of him … and force some errors,” said Edmund.
In the evening session, defending champion Reilly Opelka was upset by qualifier Jason Jung in a third consecutive match that saw the loser of the first set come back to prevail. That pattern would reveal itself in all four of Friday’s quarterfinals, as Andreas Seppi rallied after dropping the first set to take out Jordan Thompson 6-7(2), 6-4, 6-1. Seppi and Jung will meet in the second semi-final on Saturday evening, while Kecmanovic and Edmund will play in the afternoon at 4:00pm local time.
