Thanasi Kokkinakis needed a few match points to get it done, but the Australian is closer to the Cincinnati Masters main draw after a win over Laslo Djere.
Thanasi Kokkinakis has been playing pretty decent tennis lately and that's a good thing because he has to earn his place in the biggest ATP events. The Australian had to play the qualifiers for the Canadian Open in Toronto but it proved no problem.
He won both matches and secured a spot in the main draw of the event. The event itself was a pretty decent one but he suffered a painful loss to Lorenzo Musetti. It was a match he could have and probably should have won, but he lost.
There was no time to think about it too much as a new challenge awaited him in Cincinnati. He got top seed Laslo Djere in the qualifiers and expectedly it was a tough match. Djere has been playing really strong tennis lately though that was on clay.
Hard courts have always been a problem for him but he's slowly getting better on them as well. We've seen it in this match as he took a set off of Kokkinakis. The Australian was for the most part the better player. He served better which made things a lot easier for him and likely won him the match.
Djere was spectacular on his own first serve dropping only four points in the entire match behind it. So how did he lose? Well, he hit it only 50 % of the time. On the second serve, Kokkinakis did a lot of damage winning 19 of 40 points played.
Kokkinakis hit his first serve 57 % of the time and that was proved enough. If you don't have break chances you can't break and Djere didn't get too many. The final game of the match also saw Djere struggle with his own serve as he missed most of them.
That gave the Australian what he needed, and he got it done. Barely though. The final score was 6-3 3-6 7-5 as he moves on to the next round of qualifiers.
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