German Young Gun Marterer Upsets Copil for 1st Hard-Court Challenger Semi-final

The 21-year-old world No 176 fought off a set point in the second set tie-break to stun the world No 132^nd opponent in one hour and 28 minutes for his best result on a hard court Challenger.

“Mostly I played seven months on clay. It’s a good feeling to play well this week and I hope to continue this way next week in Melbourne,” said the young gun from Nuremberg who will skip next week’s Bangkok Open 2 to enter the Australian Open qualifying competition.

Marterer has won a total of eight singles ITF and Challenger titles, seven of them were on clay. His back-to-back Challenger wins occurred in September last year which propelled him to the top 200.

“I had good success last season. It’s a good week for me in my first tournament of the year here. (Against Copil) He was serving really well so I didn’t have many chances in the match. I had to serve well also. So when I had chances I had to take them,” added the German rising star who will take on 2013 and 2016 champion Blaz Kavcic of Slovenia.

“I have never played him before. It will be an interesting match. I have to recover well to get ready for that match.”

Kavcic, the former world No 68, improved his unbeatable record here for 13 matches by easily tackling the exhausted Christian Garin of Chile 7-6 (7-1) 6-1.

In the other quarter-finals, top seed Yuichi Sugita of Japan was on fire as he demolished  Jeremy Jahn of Germany 6-0 6-4. The Japanese world No 112 will set up the day’s mouth-watering match with former world No 8 and fifth seed Janko Tipsarevic of Serbia, a 6-2 6-4 winner over  Yannick Mertens of Belgium.

Janko Tipsarevic 

In the doubles semi-finals, Sonchat and Sanchai Ratiwatana went down to Frenchmen Gregoire Barrere and Jonathan Eysseric 7-6 (5-7) 7-6 (4-7). Sugita and Di Wu of China beat Chen Ti and Yi Chu-Huan of Taiwan 6-0 4-6 10-5.