Austria: Singles Champion, Into the Doubles Final

It was a great day to play tennis today, warm but not hot and just as the sun was going to be a problem serving, for a right hander, the clouds came to hide the sun enough.

I played Sylvia Friedl from Austria and France…and it was a good match, though I won 60 62. She really started playing better midway through the second set and I had to do a lot of running. We had a chair umpire and she was quite good, she missed only a couple of out calls the entire match and there were a lot of balls hit. In ITF events the chairs call all the lines from the chair, which on clay works well, as they can always check the ball mark of a disputed call. The prize giving ceremonies should be tomorrow and I can post photos then of us, hopefully she’ll still be around for it.

In the afternoon Nora Blom (who is into the 60s final tomorrow, with ease; she plays Dagmar Sperneder there) and I played doubles over at the low key Leonstein club and we won 60 61 but had some fun points as the ladies clearly had played a lot of doubles on clay and had good hands and anticipation. We play a team tomorrow (not before 4:30) who upset the #2 seeds 13-11 in the match tiebreak! I didn’t see the match but the match tiebreak must have been exciting.

Bruce Barrett, USA, men’s 65, won a tough three-setter and plays the semis tomorrow. He also won a mixed match with Australia’s Jan Johns.

Fred Kovaleski and Hugh Stewart won their doubles match today, assuring a second place finish for them in the tournament.

And that does it for Americans’ results here!

Other matches of note: Heide Orth/Petro Kruger easily won the 70 women’s singles today, dropping only a game in the tournament. Kruger plays Garaguly tomorrow in the 70 women’s singles final. Nanda Fischer, who played in several tournaments in the USA in the spring, is into the 75 singles final where she plays Elisabeth Van Boemmel in the final. She is also in the doubles final, with Nola Collins from Australia against Van Boemmel and Brigitte Jung.

I watched a bit of men’s 40s, Andrew Moraghan, GBR and Dinko Gudelj of Croatia because Andrew has been blogging about traveling around in a camper van playing tournaments all spring. He beat Gudelj, who was he top seed. The part I watched was pretty grueling clay court tennis, with both guys hitting lots of inside out forehands, and the points were mostly very long. Andrew won which puts him into the final. You can read the blog here: http://oldmanontour.blogspot.co.at/