Marathon man Mark Lajal fends off 17 breakpoints to reach Wuxi ATP quarterfinals
Estonian tennis player Mark Lajal has continued in his role as long-winded match win specialist by defeating Kazakhstan's Mikhail Kukushkin to reach the quarterfinals of the ATP Challenger 100 in Wuxi, China.
The entire encounter lasted nearly four hours for the three sets, which all went to tie-breaks, with the Estonian winning 7–6 (10–8), 6–7 (2–7), 7–6 (7–2), and rescuing no fewer than 17 break points in that time.
Lajal, ranked 158th in the fresh ATP listings, is the tournament's sixth seed. He only recently returned to competition after a period of illness early on in the year, and was ultimately the loser in a three-and-a-half-hour-long match last week in Gwangju, Korea.
He beat Japan's Renta Tokuda in straight sets in Wuxi earlier in the week, but even this match took an hour and three-quarters to complete and was fairly hard-fought.
His Wuxi round two opponent, Kukushkin, is ranked 281st in the world, and Lajal's win represents vengeance for the Kazakh's win over him in Oeiras, Portugal, back in January — again in an arduous match, lasting three and a quarter hours.
This time around, Lajal had the upper hand in the second set, but Kukushkin leveled the score and won that tiebreak convincingly. In the decider, the Estonian had two match points at 6–5, but ultimately sealed the victory after another tiebreak.
Lajal served up 18 aces in the entire match, but converted only one of the seven break points presented to him. Kukushkin, meanwhile, fared considerably worse on this metric, converting only one of the 18 break points he found himself with.
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Editor: Andrew Whyte, Siim Boikov
