Cam’s Indian summer
NORRIE MAKES LAST EIGHT AND EYES ATP FINALS SPOT
CAM NOrriE’s passable impression of a threshing machine continued last night as he fought his way into another last eight.
The british No 2 dragged himself into the quarter-finals of the bNP Paribas Open with a dour 6-4, 4-6, 6-2 victory over American Tommy Paul that took twoand-a-quarter hours in the desert heat.
A run of six consecutive breaks of serve ended with Norrie (right) holding serve for 3-2 in the decider, and finally being able to defend his lead from there.
Norrie has now won 44 matches on tour in 2021, following up his recent appearance in the san diego Open final with three more wins in the past six days. While it is a simplistic comparison, he has claimed exactly as many victories this season as Novak djokovic, who has skipped this tournament. Only five players have won more matches since January. The 26-year-old lefthander will now face 11th seed diego schwartzman, conqueror of dan Evans in the third round. The diminutive Argentine defeated another of the tour’s form players, Norwegian Casper ruud, 6-3, 6-3 and they will play tonight. should Norrie prevail he will very much keep alive his hopes of making the eight-man ATP Tour Finals, switching this year from London to Turin.
The Putney-based player is only officially ranked 27 on the current formula, but in terms of the annual ‘race’ he is up to 13.
With rafael Nadal definitely out of the Finals, the minimal cut for the lucrative event will be ninth place.
Tonight will be his first time in the quarter-finals of a Masterslevel event, a measure of the startling progress he has made in the past 12 months. if he wins he will usurp Evans as british No 1.
The prevailing conditions in this parched area of California suit Norrie’s game. The slow hard court with a relatively high bounce make his defences difficult to penetrate, as Paul discovered.
The American, ranked 54 in the world, had beaten him in both their previous meetings. Norrie, however, has steadily improved every facet of his game and was quickly in charge.
Paul mixed it up more in the second set, and the bizarre sequence of breaks began at the end of it. A marathon third game of the decider saw Norrie needing 11 break points to win it and he proved more durable in the end.