(Montreal) Italian Flavio Cobolli may have hoped that the roughly 40-hour delay between the start of his second-round match at the National Bank Tennis Open on Thursday night and his return on Saturday morning would allow him to regroup. That wasn’t the case at all.
Cobolli, who had disappointed Quebec tennis fans by eliminating Félix Auger-Aliassime on Wednesday evening on the central court of the IGA stadium, was cavalierly shown the exit door, in two sets of 6-3, 6-2 against the Frenchman Arthur Rinderknech, a player from the qualifiers.
Thursday evening, Cobolli, 33e world player and finalist in Washington last Sunday, had conceded the first three games of the match to his rival. The sequence had lasted only 15 minutes, the rain interrupting the duel. Saturday morning, on the Rogers court, the match was extended by only 56 minutes.
Ranked 65e in the world, Rinderknech completed the first set with aplomb, conceding only three points in the last three games on his serve. In the second set, he broke early and added a break in the fifth game.
Cobolli tried to get back into the match by breaking in the sixth game to reduce Rinderknech’s lead to 4-2, but in the very next game he lost his serve.
In the third round, Rinderknech will face fourth-seeded Hubert Hurkacz of Poland, who narrowly defeated Australian Thanassi Kokkinakis 4-6, 6-3, 7-6 (6). The match will be played at 4 p.m. on Saturday at the earliest.
Elsewhere, in another second-round match, American Sebastian Korda, winner in Washington last Sunday, upset his compatriot Taylor Fritz, ninth seed, in two sets of 6-4, 7-6 (4).
The match, which pitted two top-20 players against each other, was marked by just one break of serve, by Korda in the third game of the opening set. In the second set, Korda got the deciding mini-break in the eighth point of the tiebreaker.
Like Rinderknech, Korda will have a second match in the middle of the afternoon, this one against a well-rested opponent, namely the Norwegian Casper Ruud, seeded sixth. Finally, a first player reached the quarter-finals, namely the Russian Andrey Rublev, who dominated the American Brandon Nakashima 6-2, 6-2 in 62 minutes.
Rublev’s next opponent, later Saturday, will be the winner of the match between world number one Jannik Sinner of Italy and Alejandro Tabilo, a Toronto-born Chilean.