\n
\n
San Diego, Oct 5 (PTI): The top two seeds, Andrey Rublev of Russia and Casper Ruud of Norway, have reached the semi-finals of the inaugural San Diego Open.<\/p>\n
Rublev, who ended the hopes of San Diego native Brandon Nakashima on Wednesday, kept up his strong form and beat sixth-seeded Diego Schwartzman 6-1, 7-5 on Friday.<\/p>\n
Ruud reached the first tour-level hard court semi-final in his career with a routine 6-1, 6-4 victory over Italy’s Lorenzo Sonego.<\/p>\n
Rublev also beat Schwartzman in the recent Laver Cup.<\/p>\n
“The match against him at the Laver Cup helped me a lot because we hadn’t played for a really, really long time and I didn’t know what he was doing on court,” Rublev said. “The match at Laver Cup gave me confidence and also let me know how I needed to play today.”<\/p>\n
The Russian set up a Saturday showdown against Cameron Norrie of Britain, who scored his second straight upset win over a seeded player this week, defeating No. 4 Denis Shapovalov of Canada 6-3, 6-1.<\/p>\n
Ruud said his match “was closer than it may have seemed, but the key moments and important points went my way today. The three times I broke him, the games were close and at 4-3 in the second I got into a little bit of trouble on my serve but I was able to serve out a close game.<\/p>\n
“This is my first semi-final on hard court after reaching the quarters in Toronto and Cincinnati, so it’s another important step in my career. It gives me confidence for tomorrow and the belief that I can beat good players on this surface.”<\/p>\n
Ruud will face Grigor Dimitrov, after the unseeded Bulgarian outlasted Aslan Karatsev 6-1, 1-6, 6-2 in the quarter-final nightcap.<\/p>\n
\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
San Diego, Oct 5 (PTI): The top two seeds, Andrey Rublev of Russia and Casper Ruud of Norway, have reached the semi-finals of the inaugural San Diego Open. Rublev, who ended the hopes of San Diego native Brandon Nakashima on Wednesday, kept up his strong form and beat sixth-seeded Diego Schwartzman 6-1, 7-5 on Friday. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-173492","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173492","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=173492"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173492\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=173492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=173492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=173492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}