Tennis
Federer loses to Tsonga
2009-08-15 06:13
Email | Print
Montreal - A dramatic collapse saw Roger Federer lose to Jo-Wilfried Tsonga in the Rogers Cup quarterfinals on Friday, his first loss since May. The score was 7-6 (5), 1-6, 7-6 (3).
Federer led 5-1 in the third set then lost his serve twice as Tsonga took a 6-5 lead in front of a frenzied the sellout-crowd of 11,490 at Uniprix Stadium.
Federer had to save three match points to force a tiebreaker, in which Tsonga used two aces to take a 6-3, with then Federer double-faulting on match point.
Thus ending the world's top-ranked player's 22-match winning streak, which included titles at Madrid, the French Open and Wimbledon, where he claimed a record 15th career Grand Slam crown.
Federer took a break after Wimbledon while his wife gave birth to twin girls, and there were doubts about his form coming into the Rogers Cup. But he looked sharp until the end of the third set, when his first serve deserted him and he hit several wild groundstrokes.
The seventh-seeded Tsonga advanced to a semifinal on Saturday against third-seeded Andy Murray. The Frenchman leads their career head-to-heads 2-1.
Murray ended Nikolay Davydenko's 12-match winning run with a 6-2, 6-4 victory. Davydenko, seeded eighth, came into the tournament following wins at Hamburg and Umag.
Murray's string of service games won finished at 19 when Davydenko broke him in the fifth game of the first set, but he is still yet to drop a set in the tournament.
"Every time I've played against him, you never feel like you're playing your best tennis because he takes the ball so early," Murray said of Davydenko. "He rushes you. He plays very aggressively. But I had my game plan and I did it really, really well in terms of the way I struck the ball."
Murray improved to 5-4 against Davydenko to make his third trip to the Rogers Cup semifinals. Last year in Toronto, he lost to eventual champion Rafael Nadal. He was also in the semis in 2006.
It is the first time that the eight top-ranked players in the world have played in the quarterfinals of a tournament since the ATP world rankings debuted in 1973.