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London: Leander Paes and Elena Vesnina have entered the quarter finals at the Wimbledon mixed doubles event.
They defeated Max Mirnyi and Victoria Azarenka 7-6, 6-3 in the pre-quarters.
Azarenka played her women’s singles semi-final against Serena Williams earlier in the day which she lost in straight sets. The fatigue factor might have hampered the Belarusian as the pair went down to Paes-Vesnina in straight sets.
With a huge percentage of first serves, Leander and partner Vesnina had the upper hand in the match.
Although the first set went into a tie-breaker, the Indo-Russian pair managed to hang on. From then on, the India No. 1 and Vesnina had a firm grip on the match.
They now face Aussie-Russian pair of Paul Hanley and Alla Kudryavtseva in the quarters.
Earlier, in another quarter-final clash, Rohan Bopanna and his Chinese partner Jie Zheng crashed out. They lost the tie 2-6, 5-7 to the American pair of Mike Bryan and Lisa Raymond.
The dominance of the American pair was evident from the fact that they had a 73 per cent conversion of their first serve points. Bopanna and Zheng on the other hand converted only 60 per cent of the first serve points.
In the second serve points too, the pair of Bryan and Raymond enjoyed an advantage as they converted 53 per cent to the Indo-Chinese pair’s 35 per cent.
On Wednesday, the Indo-Chinese pair reached the last eight stage with a straight-set victory over the Italian pair of Daniele Bracciali and Roberta Vinci here.
The 10th-seeded Indo-Chinese combo caused an upset with a comfortable 6-0, 6-3 victory over their sixth-seeded opponents in just 40 minutes.
Bopanna-Zheng’s got a whopping 86 per cent conversion of their first serve points. Their percentage of winning points on second serve was also as high as 73 per cent.
They converted four of the nine breakpoints they got, while not giving away a single break chance to their rivals.
In the first set itself, the Indo-Chinese pair established its domination by hitting four winners, besides converting three of the seven break chances to sweep it 6-0.
In the second set, though Bracciali and Vinci tried to put up some resistance, Bopanna and Zheng proved to be too strong for them, winning a total of 30 points as compared to just 19 by the Italians.
But Bopanna and Zheng could not keep up their good work as they surrendered meekly to the experienced American pair.
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