HAMBURG
\nRoared 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.
\nHope hope Zverev is recovering from a knee injury he suffered at Wimbledon but still covered the court as Gaston played a string of drop shots.
\nGaston took the first set after a 30-ball rally, which Zverev was convinced should have been halted for a double bounce.
\nZverev bounced back to break in the next game on his way to taking the second set.
\nThe decider included five breaks of serve but Zverev took the last to lead 6-5 before holding serve to 15 to seal victory.
\nIn the quarter-finals the German will face Chinese eighth seed Zhang Zhizhen who beat Flavio Cobolli, 6-1, 7-6 (7\/5).
\nFrench fifth seed Arthur Fils also advanced, beating Serb Laslo Djere, last year\u2019s losing finalist, 7-6 (7\/3), 6-2.
\nFils, who made the semi-finals in Hamburg a year ago, reached his sixth tour-level quarter-final this season.
\nThat consistency has the 20-year-old top of the rankings in the ATP\u2019s \u2018Race to Jeddah\u2019, where the Next Generation under-21 finals will be played in December.
\nFils has reached just one final, when he won on clay in Lyon in May 2023.
\n\u201cWhen I\u2019m practising super hard like I\u2019m doing, of course I am able to show a great level and great fitness for a few hours,\u201d said Fils. \u201cIf a guy wants to beat me, it has to be tough. I am not going to let the match go.\u201d
\nFils will face second seed Holger Rune, who beat Marco Trungelliti 6-4, 6-3 in 80 minutes.
\nThe Dane said he had tried to turn his round of 16 straight sets loss to Novak Djokovic at Wimbledon into motivation.
\n\u201cIt\u2019s been very intense since Wimbledon. I only had one day off, actually,\u201d said Rune on court.
\n\u201cI was like, \u2018I don\u2019t want to rest, I want to go straight back to practice\u2019, 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.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
HAMBURG 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. Hope hope 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 …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":67533,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-67524","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\/67524","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=67524"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67524\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67543,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67524\/revisions\/67543"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/67533"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}