Britain’s Cameron Norrie battled his way to victory over seventh seed Andrey Rublev to progress to the second round of the Erste Bank Open. <\/p>\n
World number 35 Norrie won the two-hour match 6-2 6-7 (5-7) 6-2 in Austria. <\/p>\n
Norrie, 30, started the match in fine fashion and took the opening set in just 34 minutes before breaking serve to move 2-0 up in the second. <\/p>\n
The Briton served for the match at 5-4, but Rublev landed his first break of serve to force a tie-break, which he won to set up a deciding set. <\/p>\n
Former world number eight Norrie regrouped to break Rublev’s serve in the second game to take command of the third set. <\/p>\n
Norrie broke once more to book his spot in the next round, where he will face either Australia’s Alexei Popyrin or Italy’s Matteo Berrettini. <\/p>\n
“It was all round a really good performance, I was moving well and able to dictate the points,” said Norrie.<\/p>\n
“I got a bit tight and tentative when I was serving for the match but credit to him staying in and competing.”<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, there was heartbreak for British number three Jacob Fearnley who was beaten by second seed Alexander Zverev in the first round.<\/p>\n
After losing the first set, Fearnley, ranked 81st in the world, stunned the German to level the match and managed to force a third-set tie-break.<\/p>\n
However, Zverev won the hard-fought breaker to progress 6-4 1-6 7-6 (7-5) and will face Italian qualifier Matteo Arnaldi in the second round.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Britain’s Cameron Norrie battled his way to victory over seventh seed Andrey Rublev to progress to the second…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":231295,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[565],"tags":[64,63,85,747],"class_list":{"0":"post-231294","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tennis","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-sports","11":"tag-tennis"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231294","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=231294"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231294\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/231295"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=231294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=231294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=231294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}