Jack Draper claimed an emphatic victory on his long-awaited return from injury as Great Britain took control of their Davis Cup qualifying tie against Norway.<\/p>\n
British number one Draper has spent five months on the sidelines with a bruised bone in his service arm.<\/p>\n
His comeback was delayed twice by the injury and he missed January’s Australian Open to complete his recovery.<\/p>\n
However, he served well, moved sharply and showed some brutal ball-striking to bear Viktor Durasovic 6-2 6-2 in his first competitive match for 164 days.<\/p>\n
Sterner tests will await world number 13 Draper, who is ranked 300 places above Durasovic, but he will be relieved to have rattled through a convincing win after a long spell out.<\/p>\n
“It’s been a difficult time but I knew I had to keep on practising and keep learning about myself,” the 24-year-old said.<\/p>\n
Norrie then gave Britain a 2-0 lead in the tie with a characteristically gritty 6-4 6-4 win over impressive teenager Nicolai Budkov Kjaer.<\/p>\n
Lloyd Glasspool and Julian Cash can wrap up the best-of-five tie for Britain at the earliest opportunity if they triumph in Friday’s doubles.<\/p>\n
If not, Draper and Norrie will have to take to the court again for the reverse singles.<\/p>\n
The winner of the tie in Oslo will face either Australia or Ecuador for a place in November’s eight-team Finals.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jack Draper claimed an emphatic victory on his long-awaited return from injury as Great Britain took control of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":409880,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[101,118,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-409879","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\/409879","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=409879"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409879\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/409880"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=409879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=409879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=409879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}