{"id":394423,"date":"2026-01-08T04:05:07","date_gmt":"2026-01-08T04:05:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/394423\/"},"modified":"2026-01-08T04:05:07","modified_gmt":"2026-01-08T04:05:07","slug":"kyrgios-and-kokkinakis-go-down-fighting-in-brisbane-thriller-nick-kyrgios","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/394423\/","title":{"rendered":"Kyrgios and Kokkinakis go down fighting in Brisbane thriller | Nick Kyrgios"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nick Kyrgios was a motivational speaker, a part-time masseur and a dancer on the way to an entertaining doubles loss in Brisbane, with the defeat unlikely to harm his Australian Open wildcard hopes.<\/p>\n

Kyrgios and Thanasi Kokkinakis looked set for an embarrassing Brisbane International loss after copping a first-set \u201cbagel\u201d in their round-of-16 doubles match against No 6 seeds Sadio Doumbia and Fabien Reboul.<\/p>\n

The Special Ks <\/a>fought back in style to take the second set 6-1 to rouse the Pat Rafter Arena crowd, but they could not recover from a disastrous 0-5 start to the first-to-10 match tiebreak.<\/p>\n

The entertaining 6-0 1-6 (10-6 tiebreak) defeat has left Australian Open officials with a conundrum: do they hand Kyrgios one of the three remaining singles wildcards for the first major of the year?<\/p>\n

The way Kyrgios helped lift Kokkinakis when things looked at their glummest bodes well for the former Wimbledon finalist<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Kyrgios was broken in his first service game with the winning point coming when Kokkinakis fell over and the ball was hit at him.<\/p>\n

The French duo continued to assert their dominance, with a series of unforced errors from Kyrgios and Kokkinakis proving costly.<\/p>\n

At 0-5 down at the changeover, Kyrgios did his best to lift the spirits of his partner.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen we overthink things, it\u2019s not us,\u201d Kyrgios told Kokkinakis. \u201cWe play on instinct, then we feel it. Just play on instinct.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although they could not recover the first set, Kokkinakis held to love to open the second set to finally get them on the board.<\/p>\n

With the Australians up 2-1 at the next changeover, Kyrgios continued to encourage Kokkinakis to play with freedom.<\/p>\n

The crowd erupted in the fourth game when Kokkinakis ended a huge rally with a thundering backhand winner.<\/p>\n

Another backhand winner from Kokkinakis gave his team hope of snaring the break, and a double fault from Reboul handed it to the Aussies.<\/p>\n

At one point of the set, Kyrgios noticed his teammate was battling a sore neck, and gave him a quick massage.<\/p>\n

Kokkinakis produced a powerful ace to give Australia a 4-1 lead and Kyrgios did a mini dance after producing a winner to snare another break and extend the lead to 5-1.<\/p>\n

The duo wrapped up the set, but were facing defeat again after going 0-5 down in the match tiebreak.<\/p>\n

They fought back to make it 6-8, but the French duo held firm under pressure to win the next two points and secure victory.<\/p>\n

Kyrgios and Kokkinakis were the toast of Melbourne when they won the Australian Open doubles in 2022.<\/p>\n

Although injuries have plagued the duo since then they started the Brisbane International in impressive style with a shock three-sets win over grand slam champions Matt Ebden and Rajeev Ram.<\/p>\n

\u201cA little word for Kokkinaksi and Kyrgios \u2013 they\u2019ve had a lot of injuries, so very happy to see them in the tournament again, and I hope we will have many other battles,\u201d Reboul said after Wednesday\u2019s match.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nick Kyrgios was a motivational speaker, a part-time masseur and a dancer on the way to an entertaining…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":394424,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[99,428],"class_list":{"0":"post-394423","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tennis","8":"tag-sports","9":"tag-tennis"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394423","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=394423"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394423\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/394424"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=394423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=394423"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=394423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}