‘It was a couple tough games’ for Bouchard
Canadian sees her winning streak end at Wimbledon
Eugenie Bouchard’s fourmatch winning streak is over and so is the Canadian’s run at Wimbledon.
The 24-year-old native of Westmount, Que., dropped a 6-4, 7-5 decision to No. 17 seed Ashleigh Barty of Australia in the second round of the grasscourt major on Thursday.
Bouchard, who won three qualifying matches to get into the main draw after seeing her ranking tumble to No. 188, led 5-2 in the second set against Barty and had one set point, but couldn’t pull it off.
“It was a couple tough games. I wish maybe at 5-3 I just took a little bit more time and focused on my serve to maybe try and put some better first serves in,” Bouchard said. “But I was trying to be aggressive and she came up with some good shots, some tricky shots and that was to be expected as well but I gave everything.”
Later in the day, No. 26 seed Denis Shapovalov of Richmond Hill, Ont., was eliminated after dropping a 0-6, 6-2, 6-4, 7-6 (3) decision to Benoit Paire of France in second-round play.
Shapovalov also missed on a crucial set point that would have given him the fourth set and tied the match. But Paire got out of trouble with a perfect lob to the baseline, and went on to win the set, and the match, in a tiebreaker.
“I had all the momentum after the first set and I blew that, and after that he played really well and I wasn’t able to play well,” Shapovalov said.
The match featured two previous winners of the Wimbledon girls’ title - Barty captured the crown in 2011, a feat matched by Bouchard a year later.
Bouchard went on to reach the Wimbledon women’s final in 2014, while Barty hadn’t won a match in the main draw until this year.
In what will be his last competitive match at Wimbledon, Toronto’s Daniel Nestor and partner Jurgen Melzer of Austria were defeated 6-3, 6-4, 6-4 by the eighth-seeded team of Austria’s Alexander Peya and Croatia’s Nikola Mektic. The 45-year-old Nestor, who plans to retire after the upcoming Rogers Cup in Toronto, won back-to-back Wimbledon men’s doubles titles with Nenad Zimonjic in 2008 and 2009.