London: While Indian veteran Leander Paes progressed to the third round of men’s doubles, compatriot Sania Mirza lost out in the women’s doubles second round on a rain affected Day VI of the All England Tennis Championship at Wimbledon.
Heavy showers stopped play Saturday afternoon when Mexican-American pair Santiago Gonzalez and Scott Lipsky were leading 2-1 in the first set against fifth seeded Indo-Czech duo Leander Paes and Radek Stepanek.
After the restart on Court No. 10, veterans Paes and Stepanek got a tough fight from their unseeded opponents but came out victorious 3-6, 6-1, 3-6, 6-3, 11-9 in a three hour battle.
After sharing the first four sets, both teams successfully defended their service games until at the very end the fifth seeds broke Gonzalez and Lipsky on their fifth break point of the set, which lasted an hour and 15 minutes.
Paes-Stepanek next play the winners of the match between Feliciano Lopez and Jurgen Melzer and 11th seeds Jean-Julien Rojer and Horia Tecau.
On the adjacent Court No. 11, Indo-Zimbabwean fourth seeds Mirza and Cara Black were defeated 6-2, 6-7(7), 4-6 by Russian-Czech combine of Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova and Lucie Safarova in two hours and 26 minutes.
Mirza and Black were well on their way to clinching the match after easily winning the first set in 26 minutes. The fourth seeds were leading the second set tiebreaker, but Pavlyuchenkova and Safarova turned the tables by winning the set and pushing the match into the decider.
In the third set, the unseeded pair decisively broke Mirza and Black twice to enter the third round.
Rohan Bopanna’s both men’s and mixed doubles matches were cancelled and postponed due to inclement weather.
