Raonic goes through at Wimbledon
LONDON — Sixth-seeded Canadian Milos Raonic was efficient on Saturday in advancing to the fourth round at Wimbledon.
The Thornhill, Ont., player dispatched Spain’s Albert RamosVinolas 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.
All it took was a couple of questionable calls for Novak Djokovic to snap at the chair umpire in the second game of his third-round 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 ninegame 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 and a French Open semifinalist, but missed chunks of playing time because of 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 has not dropped a set so far this fortnight.
“That only can boost my confidence level for whatever is coming up next,” No. 2-seeded Djokovic said.
After the grass-court Grand Slam tournament’s traditional middle Sunday off, he will face 51st-ranked Adrian Mannarino of France for a place in the quarterfinals.
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, who is 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 in the tournament so far, including Saturday’s 7-6 (3), 6-4, 6-4 win against No. 27 Mischa Zverev, Alexander’s older, left-handed, serve-andvolleying 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.
The result made Federer the first man to get to 15-0 in thirdround matches at Wimbledon.
The matchups on the top half of the men’s draw are defending champion Andy Murray vs. Benoit Paire, two-time Wimbledon winner Rafael Nadal vs. No. 16 Gilles Muller, No. 7 Marin Cilic vs. No. 18 Roberto Bautista Agut and No. 24 Sam Querrey vs. Kevin Anderson.