Former British No. 1 Dan Evans is out of Australian Open qualifying following a first-round defeat to Japan’s Rei Sakomoto.<\/p>\n
The 35-year-old was beaten 6-1 6-2 as he appeared to struggle with his serve.<\/p>\n
He double-faulted four times and made just 48% of his first serves, compared to Sakomoto’s 78%.<\/p>\n
Fellow British players Jack Pinnington Jones<\/a>, Jay Clarke<\/a> and Oliver Crawford<\/a> also lost on the first day in Melbourne, while Arthur Fery<\/a> and George Loffhagen<\/a> advanced to the second qualifying round.<\/p>\n – Which Brits are playing in the 2026 Australian Open?<\/a><\/p>\n Cameron Norrie<\/a> is one of six Bris who are in the main draw, and he claimed a straight-sets win over Hugo Gaston<\/a> in the opening round of the ASB Classic.<\/p>\n The British No. 2 secured a 6-3 6-4 victory to reach the last 16 in Auckland, where he will face either Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard<\/a> or Roberto Bautista Agut<\/a>.<\/p>\n Both players started the first set brightly until Norrie found the first break in the fifth game and comfortably saw the set out with another break in the final game.<\/p>\n The second set was on course for a tie-break until Gaston had his serve broken in the 10th game after double-faulting twice as Norrie secured victory in an hour and 20 minutes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Former British No. 1 Dan Evans is out of Australian Open qualifying following a first-round defeat to Japan’s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":402998,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[99,428],"class_list":{"0":"post-402997","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\/402997","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=402997"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/402997\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/402998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=402997"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=402997"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=402997"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}