tokyo
\nCarlos Alcaraz won his first title since returning from a four-month injury layoff after beating the Czech Republic\u2019s Jiri Lehecka 7-6 (7\/4), 6-4 in Tuesday\u2019s Japan Open final.
\nTop seed and defending champion Alcaraz was made to work hard by world number 19 Lehecka in Tokyo before going on to lift his first trophy since the Qatar Open in February.
\nIt was Alcaraz\u2019s third tournament since coming back from a wrist injury, following a run to the US Open quarter-finals and an appearance at the Laver Cup.
\n\u201cA lot of negative thoughts come to your mind, if you\u2019re going to come back healthy, if you\u2019re going to be the same as I was before,\u201d said Alcaraz.
\n\u201cA lot of thoughts came to my mind but I tried to put those thoughts away all the time.
\n\u201cMy team and I knew that when I came back I was going to be healthy 100 percent and if I feel something, it\u2019s not going to be anything at all.\u201d
\nThis was the world number three\u2019s third title of the year including the Australian Open, and the 27th of his career.
\nIt came hours after world number one Jannik Sinner announced that he had brought a premature end to his season due to an ongoing knee injury.
\nAlcaraz went into the final with a 3-1 career head-to-head record against Lehecka, who was looking to win his first title of the year.
\nAlcaraz had his service broken immediately by a confident-looking Lehecka, who gave his top-seeded opponent no time to settle.
\nThe Spaniard broke back in a long tussle midway through the first set and followed that up with a brutal display of power tennis in the next game.
\nLehecka proved a tough nut to crack though, and Alcaraz needed to pull out a pair of spectacular drop shots to clinch the first set in a tiebreaker.
\nLehecka continued to give Alcaraz problems but the defending champion went a break up midway through the second set and made no mistakes to close out the victory.
\nAlcaraz is scheduled to play in the Shanghai Masters starting Wednesday.
\nHe pulled out of last year\u2019s tournament at the last minute after winning in Tokyo, blaming \u201cphysical issues\u201d and taking aim at tennis\u2019 packed schedule.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
tokyo Carlos Alcaraz won his first title since returning from a four-month injury layoff after beating the Czech Republic\u2019s Jiri Lehecka 7-6 (7\/4), 6-4 in Tuesday\u2019s Japan Open final. Top seed and defending champion Alcaraz was made to work hard by world number 19 Lehecka in Tokyo before going on to lift his first trophy …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":104014,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-104029","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104029","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104029"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104029\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":104040,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104029\/revisions\/104040"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/104014"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}