Dutch tennis player Botic van de Zandschulp saved match point to avoid losing in straight sets, before staging a huge comeback to advance to the US Open quarterfinals.<\/p>\n
The 30-year-old, who downed Australian Alex de Minaur in a second-round upset at Flushing Meadows, was on the brink of defeat against Frenchman Arthur Gea but recovered to make it to a grand slam quarterfinal for the second time in his career.<\/p>\n
Gea, who got into the main draw tournament when 2022 runner-up Casper Ruud pulled out with a back injury, was trying to become the first lucky loser to make a men’s singles grand slam quarterfinal.<\/p>\n
After winning the opening two sets, Gea had match point in the third-set tiebreaker, but van de Zandschulp saved that, then staged his comeback to claim a 3-6, 6-7(0), 7-6(7), 7-6(3), 6-4 victory in 5 hours, 13 minutes.<\/p>\n
It was the fourth-longest match in US Open history.<\/p>\n
“I think this is probably better than the first quarterfinal I made here,” van de Zandschulp said, referring to his other US Open quarterfinal appearance in 2021.<\/p>\n
“It hasn’t sunk in yet, but I think tomorrow it’s going to be a great feeling.”<\/p>\n
Number 28 seed Alexander Blockx beat 24th seed Francisco Cerundolo 6-3, 4-6, 7-5, 7-5 to become the first man from Belgium to reach the US Open quarterfinals, where he will play Karen Khachanov.<\/p>\n
Khachanov also needed five sets to advance to the quarterfinal stage, downing American 14th seed Learner Tien 7-5, 4-6, 6-7(6), 6-1, 6-4.<\/p>\n
Men’s number one seed Alexander Zverev is playing the final match of the day against Italian 21st seed Luciano Darderi.<\/p>\n
ABC\/AP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dutch tennis player Botic van de Zandschulp saved match point to avoid losing in straight sets, before staging…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":884023,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[565],"tags":[153801,5244,64,63,108927,1806,43680,1025,85,747,1751],"class_list":["post-884022","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-alexander-blockx","tag-alexander-zverev","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-botic-van-de-zandschulp","tag-grand-slam","tag-karen-khachanov","tag-new-york","tag-sports","tag-tennis","tag-us-open"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/884022","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=884022"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/884022\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/884023"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=884022"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=884022"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=884022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}