Three-time Grand Slam champion Stan Wawrinka began his farewell season with \u200da battling victory over Frenchman Arthur Rinderknech at the United Cup on Saturday and declared that turning \u200b40 had not dulled his competitive edge.<\/p>\n
Switzerland’s Wawrinka<\/a>, who made his debut in 2002 and will celebrate his 41st \u200cbirthday in March, said last month he wanted to \u200cbring the curtain down on his career at the end of the season.<\/p>\n He toiled in the Perth heat to seal a 5-7, 7-6(5), 7-6(5) win<\/a> over world number 29 \u2060Rinderknech<\/a>, showing the resilience he will hope to take to \u200cthis month’s Australian Open, an event he won in 2014 \u200bbefore enjoying further Grand Slam triumphs at the French and US Opens.<\/p>\n “I’d have loved a quicker \u200dwin, but no, this is why I keep playing. I’m passionate about the game. I’m always going \u200dto push my own \u200climit,” Wawrinka told reporters after giving his team a 2-0 lead.<\/p>\n “I’ve said I’ve been working hard this off-season. Even if it’s my last year, I don’t just \u2060want to play to play. I want to play to compete and try to win.<\/p>\n “I’m super happy with the performance today, with the win. It was a tough fight, big fight, but I stayed quite positive and really focused on my own discipline during the game.<\/p>\n “I try to find solutions, find the better way of playing. When I got the opportunity to finish, I went for it.”<\/p>\n Switzerland went on to \u2060seal a 3-0 win in the mixed team event \u200cfeaturing 18 countries.<\/p>\n Wawrinka is currently 157 in the world rankings following a spell of injuries and has not reached a Grand Slam quarter-final since the 2020 Australian Open.<\/p>\n He will require a wildcard to \u2060enter the Australian Open, which runs from \u200bJanuary 18 to February 1.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Three-time Grand Slam champion Stan Wawrinka began his farewell season with \u200da battling victory over Frenchman Arthur Rinderknech…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":351091,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[101,118,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-351090","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-sports","tag-tennis","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351090","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=351090"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351090\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/351091"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=351090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=351090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=351090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}