his dramatic cramping in the third round on a scorching day against American Eliot Spizzirri<\/a>.<\/p>\nBut there were no signs of trouble on Monday as Sinner ran full pelt from start to finish against 22nd seed Darderi, keeping court-time to a comfortable two hours and nine minutes.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was very, very difficult, first of all. We are very good friends off the court.<\/p>\n
Loading<\/p>\n
\u201cI got very, very tired (in the third set) so I\u2019m very happy I closed it in three sets.\u201d<\/p>\n
While unseeded Spizzirri gave Sinner a scare with his tenacity and firepower, Argentine-born Darderi made the champion\u2019s job far easier by not turning up in the first two sets.<\/p>\n
Sinner stormed to a 5-0 lead in the first before Darderi, in his first appearance in the last 16 of a Grand Slam, finally held serve.<\/p>\n
Sinner responded by serving out to love, wrapping up the set in 27 minutes with his 12th winner, a monstrous cross court forehand that kissed the sideline.<\/p>\n
Struggling to stay in touch, Darderi completely lost his rag in the third game, and slammed his racket into the court when he slapped a loose backhand well over the baseline.<\/p>\n
He fired a forehand wide to be broken on the next point and smashed a tennis ball high into the crowd to earn a code of conduct warning.<\/p>\n
Though able to simmer down and hold serve a couple of times, Darderi double-faulted twice in succession to gift the second set and slumped in his chair to have a trainer work on a problematic left thigh.<\/p>\n
Darderi dug deep, though, to make a game of the third set and gradually made inroads by attacking Sinner\u2019s forehand.<\/p>\n
Sinner faced four break points at 4-4 but saved them all and returned the pressure on Darderi\u2019s serve. Darderi saved two match points to delight the centre court crowd but it was a brief stay of execution as Sinner charged to a 6-2 lead in the tie-break before closing it out when Darderi hit long.<\/p>\n
Reuters<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jannik Sinner swept aside concerns about his heat tolerance as he breezed to a 6-1, 6-3, 7-6 (7-2)…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":438719,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[565],"tags":[64,63,85,747],"class_list":["post-438718","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/438718","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=438718"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/438718\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/438719"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=438718"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=438718"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=438718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}