Raonic on cruise control at Wimbledon
Canadian turns in efficient effort to roll over Spanish foe in straight sets and advance to fourth round
Sixth-seeded Canadian Milos Raonic was nothing if not efficient on Saturday in advancing to the fourth round at Wimbledon.
The Thornhill, Ont., product dispatched Spain’s Albert Ramos-Vinolas 7-6 (3), 6-4, 7-5 a year after losing to Andy Murray in last year’s final at the All England Club.
Raonic finished with more than twice as many winners (55) as unforced errors (26). He also had 21 aces in advancing to the fourth round for the third time in four years.
“I did a lot of things well,” Raonic said. “I was efficient on my serve, created a bunch of opportunities. I started getting better and better there.
“Maybe at the beginning I wasn’t controlling the situation enough. But as the match went on, I felt like I was dictating more so from the baseline.”
Up next for Raonic is No. 10 Alexander Zverev, who beat Austrian qualifier Sebastian Ofner 6-4, 6-4, 6-2.
Meanwhile, all it took was a couple of questionable calls for Novak Djokovic to snap at the chair umpire in the second game of his thirdround match at Wimbledon.
“That’s two points in a row at the beginning of the match,” Djokovic said, before telling official Jake Garner: “Focus, please!”
That would have been good advice for Djokovic himself. Maybe he was a bit on edge because this was the stage at which, as a two-time defending champion, he lost at the All England Club a year ago. On Saturday, Djokovic briefly fell behind by an early break before zipping past Ernests Gulbis of Latvia 6-4, 6-1, 7-6 (2) to earn his 10th berth in the tournament’s second week.
Right after his conversation with Garner, Djokovic lost a service game to trail 2-1. He later fell behind 4-2 in the opening set. But from there, Djokovic used a nine-game run to seize control and wasn’t broken again.
“As soon as you give a guy like Novak the tools to step on the gas, he will step on the gas,” said Gulbis, who has been a top-10 player but missed chunks of time due to injuries, dropping his ranking outside the top 500. “And he just goes, and he doesn’t look back.”
Three of Djokovic’s 12 major championships have come at Wimbledon, and after a real dip in results over the past 12 months, he hasn’t dropped a set so far this fortnight.
“That only can boost my confidence level,” the No. 2-seeded Djokovic said, “for whatever is coming up next.”
After the grass court Grand Slam tournament’s traditional middle Sunday off, he’ll face 51st-ranked Adrian Mannarino of France for a place in the quarter-finals.
All 16 fourth-round singles matches are scheduled for Monday — Wimbledon is the only major that does it that way — including these in the bottom half of the men’s draw: No. 3 Roger Federer vs. No. 13 Grigor Dimitrov, a guy nicknamed “Baby Fed” because of his similarities to the seven-time Wimbledon champion; and 2010 runner-up Tomas Berdych vs. No. 8 Dominic Thiem.
Federer, like Djokovic, has won every set he’s played this week, including Saturday’s 7-6 (3), 6-4, 6-4 win against No. 27 Mischa Zverev, Alexander’s older, left-handed, serve-and-volleying brother.
“It’s important to get through the first week with a good feeling,” said Federer, who compiled hard-to-believe official statistics of 61 winners to a mere seven unforced errors, “and I think I got that.”
The result made Federer the first man to get to 15-0 in third-round matches at Wimbledon.