Roared on by Hamburg fans defending champion Alexander Zverev battled through to the quarter-finals Thursday with a 4-6, 6-2, 7-5 victory over Frenchman Hugo Gaston.
Zverev is recovering from a knee injury he suffered at Wimbledon but still covered the court as Gaston played a string of drop shots.
Gaston took the first set after a 30-ball rally, which Zverev was convinced should have been halted for a double bounce.
Zverev bounced back to break in the next game on his way to taking the second set.
The decider included five breaks of serve but Zverev took the last to lead 6-5 before holding serve to 15 to seal victory.
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In the quarter-finals the German will face Chinese eighth seed Zhang Zhizhen who beat Flavio Cobolli, 6-1, 7-6 (7/5).
French fifth seed Arthur Fils also advanced, beating Serb Laslo Djere, last year’s losing finalist, 7-6 (7/3), 6-2.
Fils, who made the semi-finals in Hamburg a year ago, reached his sixth tour-level quarter-final this season.
That consistency has the 20-year-old top of the rankings in the ATP’s ‘Race to Jeddah’, where the Next Generation under-21 finals will be played in December.
Fils has reached just one final, when he won on clay in Lyon in May 2023.
“When I’m practising super hard like I’m doing, of course I am able to show a great level and great fitness for a few hours,” said Fils. “If a guy wants to beat me, it has to be tough. I am not going to let the match go.”
Fils will face second seed Holger Rune, who beat Marco Trungelliti 6-4, 6-3 in 80 minutes.
The Dane said he had tried to turn his round of 16 straight sets loss to Novak Djokovic at Wimbledon into motivation.
“It’s been very intense since Wimbledon. I only had one day off, actually,” said Rune on court.
“I was like, ‘I don’t want to rest, I want to go straight back to practice’, because I was very disappointed. I went straight back to work on the things that needed to be done, and now I have the chance to train those things in matches.”
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