John Isner continued his dominant play at the BB&T Atlanta Open with a straight sets win over Lucas Lacko on Friday.
In a back-and-forth match dictated by serves, Isner broke Lacko when he needed to and came away with 7-5, 6-4 win to reach the semifinals for an eighth consecutive year.
“I don’t want to jinx it right now, but I’ve always played well here,” said Isner, a University of Georgia product. “Of course, I love this tournament. I come here every year. I’ve been fortunate enough to be healthy every year and keep coming back. (We’ll) see what I can do tomorrow.”
With the first set tied at 5-5, Isner broke serve for the first time to avoid going into a potential tiebreaker. He also broke serve in the second set in his only other opportunity. For the first time in 53 service games, he allowed a break point to Lacko, but saved it.
“Yeah, dang it that was a horrible service performance today,” Isner said jokingly about the break point. “No, I served well. He was for a good portion of the match on me a little bit. He returned well. I stayed calm at that break point and hit three great serves. I got out of dodge there and then was able to play a great game at 5-all to win the first set.”
Isner will face Gilles Muller in the semis Saturday. He’s 3-2 against him in his career.
Georgia Tech tennis player Christopher Eubanks’ extraordinary run came to an end in the quarterfinals.
Facing the fourth-seeded Ryan Harrison, Eubanks fell in straight sets (6-1, 6-2).
“I think I played some pretty good tennis at times, but just not enough,” Eubanks said. “Not enough to compete and it just makes me hungrier to get back to the drawing board, get stronger, get in better shape, so that I can come back and contend with guys round after round, opposed to doing it for a match or two.”
Eubanks made the main draw through qualifying and upset Taylor Fritz and Jared Donaldson to reach the quarterfinals.
With 10 double faults and just 48 percent of his service points won, Eubanks fell in a deep hole early that he was unable to get out of. Harrison allowed zero break points in the match.
“I definitely did not get off to a good start serving,” Eubanks said.” My game usually goes how my serve goes. So, if my serve goes well, if you look at the past couple matches if you look at my stats, I was serving really well. Today I was not serving nearly as well. I don’t know what the stats were, but I can tell they were not that good. My game kind of goes with that.”
Harrison reached his third semifinal at the Atlanta Open with the win. He beat John Millman in the second round after receiving a bye to start the tournament.
“Chris was pretty aggressive early and made a few errors, so I was just trying to focus on keeping my first-serve percentage up,” Harrison said. “I usually do a good job of making a lot of balls back and putting the extra ball back on the court, so I think that was something that helped me out on the long run today.”
Harrison will face the winner of Friday’s match between Jack Sock and Kyle Edmund.
“We’ll see how it goes,” Harrison said. “They’re both great players.”
With the hometown crowd behind him, Eubanks said he really felt the pressure and anxiousness with the match.
“The compounded pressure from playing two really physical matches. … Not getting much sleep last night because I was so excited after winning the match, I was so anxious,” he said. “I did not get much sleep at all. I was really wired and ready to go.”
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