With a huge disappointment, the semi-final evening of the 27. edition
With a huge disappointment, the semi-final evening of the 27. The second edition of the HTT-Australian Open in UTC La Ville ended. After a total of only one and a half hours of tennis, the glamorous and highly anticipated semi-final showdown was over again, and the double pack in the fight for the two finals tickets for the first Grand Slam tournament of the new HTT season with four really great tennis players had suffered a brutal shipwreck. Lukas Prüger, who ran into a 64-minute 2:6,2:6,2:6 debacle against January GTT-500 champion Markus Neuhauser, delivered the first-ranked Lukas Prüger in a way he had never seen before. After just over half an hour, the second semi-final of the January Grand Slam tournament was over. In a new edition of the January HTTT-500 semi-final against CTP Pötzleinsdorf figurehead Philipp Jahn, Vukicevic-Bezwinger Max Berger had to give up with unbearable pain in his right upper arm at a score of 3:6.0:1, and his ambitions for the first HTT Major Final participation had to give up prematurely ad acta. In the grand finale – best of five by the way and on Wednesday evening at 8:15 p. m. LIVE on www.hobbytennistour.at – Markus Neuhauser and Philipp Jahn will have their second duel within a week. A report by C. L.
The 105. HTT Grand Slam Tournament of the Open era culminates again in a duel between Markus Neuhauser and Philipp Jahn in its decisive phase, and so the name of last year’s overflier and superior leader of the rankings, Lukas Prüger, is missing in the first big finale of the new HTT season. The 19-year-old had been shown in just 64 minutes by a solid player Markus Neuhauser, and failed in the semi-finals of the HTT-Australian Open for the third time after 2014 and 2016 with a deeply disappointing 2:6,2:6. For the first time in a HTT Grand Slam tournament, Lukas Prüger was the number one with a lot of self-confidence and broad chest to his 16th birthday. Semifinal and fourth Grand Slam semi-final of his career. No wonder, the young star of Schwechater TC had been unbeaten on the highest HTT level since 9 Grand Slam matches, and with 40 victories from his last 41 games pumped full of self-confidence in his first duel with the newly crowned January HTTT 500 winner Markus Neuhauser.
But after just 17 minutes, Pugger’s game was already shaken in its foundations. The HTT industry leader was trailing by 0:4 with two broken breaks, a classic false start like last season’s seven-time winner of the last season’s HTT French Open semi-final against Matthias Wolf, when he even clinched a 6-0 win. This disgrace remained in Prüger’s mind on the evening of the 23rd day. Although this did not save the world on 1 January 2018, it did not change anything about the disaster suffered. Although the 19-year-old did make a good job of 4-1 in the fifth game after a well-considered service game, the leader of the rankings had to accept the first set loss in the course of the tournament with a score of 2:6 minutes later after three missed break chances to the possible 2:4. But it should get even worse! The overall rather modest level of this semi-final-cracker became clear at the beginning of the second round, when Markus Neuhauser suddenly went beyond Gut & Böse, and at 0:1 and his own serve he rejuvenated a confident 40:15 lead with four mistakes against a long beaten opponent. Prüger had “inherited” his first break, set it to 2-0 and let his fans at home dream of the second HTT Grand Slam title after the HTT French Open 2017 at the live ticker. It became a nightmare, because despite the short-term 2-0 lead, Prüger couldn’t find his game anymore. Moreover, the leader of the rankings was not even in a position to approach the problem more tactically and variably. This was followed by the most disastrous quarter of an hour of Prüger’s career, in which the 19-year-old stumbled from a 2-0 into a 3-2 win with 0-12 points en suite.
In the end, there were six games in a row the fighters lost, four of them to zero and without winning points. Only 4 winners with 16 unforced mistakes, not a single point win on the second serve, Prüger was happy and relieved when the sad spectacle finally came to an end 18 minutes after 9:00 pm. For the first time after 9 tournaments in a row, Prüger was eliminated before the finals, demoralized and perplexed “I have no explanation for my performance today. This has never happened to me before. You can have a weak day once, but I’ve never played that bad before. I wasn’t even able to change my game and try anything else today. Anyway, there are worse things. It’s all just a game, although of course it wasn’t fun today,”says Prüger. And indeed, only one tennis game was lost, one that could not diminish the performance and performance of HTT No. 1 in the past few months. 40 of his last 42 matches on the Hobby Tennis Tour won, the leader of the rankings expanded from 970 points to 2530 points and a well-deserved Maldives vacation before the eyes of all the good things in the house of Prüger, who learned from this defeat, and returned to the tour strengthened and strengthened.
In his first HTT Grand Slam finale on Wednesday evening, Prüger’s Markus Neuhauser will meet Philipp Jahn in a new edition of the previous week’s January HTTT-500 final, who benefited from Maximilian Berger’s injury-related task in the semi-finals. The 21-year-old from Hietzinger TV had to give up with severe pain in the upper part of his arm after the first game of the second set at 3:6,0:1, and had to bury his dreams of the first HTT Major Final of his career. Jahn had quickly led 5:1, Berger fought his way up to 3:5, but at the end he felt during the first round that he would not be able to finish his first HTT Grand Slam final. Philipp Jahn, on the other hand, has an unprecedented masel at Grand Slam tournaments on his way to the final. While other players have to fight through the toughest grid of all time, the Viennese player, who was seeded at No. 13, continued his fight without a fight in round 3 against Martin Vesely as well as in the last sixteen against Kevin Köck. And now in the semi-finals also Maximilian Berger’s task, so there must be enough strength for the final showdown against Markus Neuhauser!