Playing their fourth final of this season, Rohan Bopanna and Matthew Ebden lost a chance to capture their second ATP Masters title together following a 3-6, 6-3, 3-10 defeat to Russian pair Andrey Rublev and Karen Khachanov in the ATP 1000 Madrid Open doubles final on Saturday.
In a tricky title clash against two singles specialists at the top of their individual games — Rublev is ranked 6th in singles and Khachanov 12th — the Indian-Aussie pair was blown away in the match tie-break where it lost the first six points. The seventh seeds had forced the 10-point shootoff with a break in the fourth game of the second set after losing the first.
Falling one step short of the season’s third title after winning the ATP 250 Doha and Indian Wells Masters, it was still a “fantastic week”, as Bopanna termed it in his post-final speech, for the duo where it took out the top-ranked Wesley Koolhof and Neal Skupski in the quarter-finals.
The run to the final that fetched 600 points lifted them to No. 1 in the ATP live doubles team rankings (the top eight qualify for the year-ending ATP Finals). Coming off a semi-final show at last month’s ATP 500 Barcelona, also on clay, it augurs well for the duo’s ambitions at the French Open starting this month after a first-round exit at the Australian Open. Bopanna and Ebden had decided to pair up at the start of the season.
Bopanna, 43, continues to turn the clock back. The world No. 13, set to move to 11 in the updated rankings, played his first final on the clay courts of Madrid since 2016. Two months ago, he had won his first Masters crown since 2017 — fifth of his career overall — at Indian Wells, becoming the oldest ATP Masters 1000 champion in history.
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