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MELBOURNE\u00a0 – Home favourite Alex de Minaur eased into the second round of the Australian Open with a 6-7(6) 6-3 2-0 victory on Monday after his Canadian opponent Milos Raonic retired injured early in the third set.<\/p>\nMELBOURNE\u00a0 – Home favourite Alex de Minaur eased into the second round of the Australian Open with a 6-7(6) 6-3 2-0 victory on Monday after his Canadian opponent Milos Raonic retired injured early in the third set.<\/p>\n
Raonic, a former world number three, arrived in Melbourne ranked 317th in the world after struggling with various injuries for more than two years and having not played a competitive match since November.<\/p>\n
But the 33-year-old Canadian rolled back the years with a serving masterclass in the opening set, racing through his service games without facing a break point before winning a tiebreak to take a shock lead in the match.<\/p>\n
De Minaur, the 10th seed, came out firing at the start of the second as Raonic visibly tired and appeared to be favouring his hip.<\/p>\n
The Australian broke to take a 4-2 lead in the second as his opponent’s levels dropped further, and levelled the match when Raonic missed with a backhand.<\/p>\n
The Canadian was broken again at the start of the third set, before throwing in the towel in the next game.<\/p>\n
“Look first of all I hope Milos a speedy recovery. It’s not great to see him like this,” De Minaur said in his courtside interview.<\/p>\n
“As you saw I was just chasing his serve for the better part of that match. I was a bit unlucky not to win the first set but I just reset at the start of the second.<\/p>\n
“It’s no secret I’ve started the year pretty well and now it’s all about keeping my head down and keep working hard. It’s one down and on to the next.”<\/p>\n
Up next for the home hope is a second round clash with Italy’s Matteo Arnaldi, who beat Australian wild card Adam Walton in his opening encounter. (Reuters)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
MELBOURNE\u00a0 – Home favourite Alex de Minaur eased into the second round of the Australian Open with a 6-7(6) 6-3 2-0 victory on Monday after his Canadian opponent Milos Raonic retired injured early in the third set. Raonic, a former world number three, arrived in Melbourne ranked 317th in the world after struggling with various injuries for more than two years and having not played a competitive match since November. But the 33-year-old Canadian rolled back the years with a serving masterclass in the opening set, racing through his service…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":660093,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47741],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-660091","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports-english"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660091","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=660091"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660091\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":660094,"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660091\/revisions\/660094"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/660093"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=660091"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=660091"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=660091"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}