Jack Draper’s start to the clay-court season began in disappointing fashion as he retired injured late in the deciding third set of his first-round match against Argentine\u00a0Tomas Martin Etcheverry at the Barcelona Open.<\/p>\n
Despite winning the first set in his first match since his second-round exit from the hard-court Miami Open on March 20, Draper struggled with his movement thereafter and had tape applied below his right knee by a physio in the break between second and third sets.<\/p>\n
But after losing the second set 6-3, Draper had just been broken for the second time and trailed Etcheverry by 4-1 in the third before withdrawing from the match.<\/p>\n
Draper, ranked one place higher than his opponent in the ATP rankings, had started promisingly to take the first set 6-3 but was clearly hindered with his knee from the start of the second set as Etcheverry, who had last week taken world No 2 Carlos Alcaraz to three sets on the clay in Monte Carlo, soon took control.<\/p>\n
“He was playing unbelievable,” said Etcheverry.<\/p>\n
“He is a great competitor. I liked how he plays. He’s a great fighter and hopefully he can recover as soon as he can to get back on tour because the tour likes him.”<\/p>\n
Twitter<\/p>\n
This content is provided by Twitter, which may be using cookies and other technologies. Unfortunately we have been unable to verify if you have consented to Twitter cookies. Enable Cookies<\/a> Barcelona had represented only Draper’s fourth tournament back on the ATP Tour since a left-arm injury had kept him sidelined since last August’s US Open, with Etcheverry representing the eighth match of his return.<\/p>\n He is next due to play at the ATP Masters 1000 event in Madrid from April 22, where he reached the final last year before losing to Casper Ruud.<\/p>\n Etcheverry will now play either Portugal’s Nuno Borges or France’s Adrian Mannarino in the second round at Real Club de Tenis Barcelona.<\/p>\n Watch the ATP and WTA Tours, live on Sky Sports or stream with NOW<\/a> and the Sky Sports app<\/a>, giving Sky Sports customers access to over 50 per cent more live sport this year at no extra cost. Find out more here.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jack Draper’s start to the clay-court season began in disappointing fashion as he retired injured late in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":604350,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[565],"tags":[64,63,85,747],"class_list":{"0":"post-604349","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\/604349","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=604349"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/604349\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/604350"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=604349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=604349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=604349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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