Hutchins reaches career high doubles ranking (From Your Local Guardian)

Hutchins reaches career high doubles ranking

10:23am Friday 9th March 2012 in Tennis

Wimbledon’s Ross Hutchins won the 2012 Delray Beach Doubles Championship in Florida last Sunday to push him to his highest ever doubles ranking, writes James Haggis.

Hutchins and his partner, Colin Fleming, came from a set down to take the second through a tie-break, with the third going right to the wire as well as the victory pushed Hutchins up three places to a career high 27 in the world, with Fleming at 25.

The Brit duo beat the Slovakian-Brazilian pairing of Michal Mertinak and Andre Sa 2-6 7-6 (7-5) 7-6 (15-13), having saved a match point in the final set when the scores were at 10-11, in just under two hours.

“It was like an emotional rollercoaster really,” said Hutchins, whose father is a former Davis Cup captain.

“We managed to come up with big points when we needed them.

“Colin always amazingly makes these shots and he keeps saying he is lucky, but it is not luck and he did that again.”

Hutchins and his partner, who made the Wimbledon quarter finals last year and hope to represent Great Britain at this year's Olympics, were third seeds in the competition and did not lose a set on their way to the final.

They knocked out the American-Australian pairing of Ryan Sweeting and Bernard Tomic, 6-4 7-5, and the all-Belgian pair of Steve Darcis and Olivier Rochus, 6-1 6-2, in the first and second rounds.

In the semi-final, they beat an Eastern European duo of Mikhail Elgin and Denis Istomin 7-6 (8-6), 6-4.