Benoit Paire won the match of the day at the Moselle Open on Friday, saving one match point to knock out 2014 champion and top-seeded Belgian David Goffin. The Frenchman dented Goffin’s hopes of making up ground in the Emirates ATP Race To London with a 7-6(3), 5-7, 7-6(7) victory over two hours and 25 minutes in Metz.

Paire recovered from a 2-4 deficit in the first set, prior to being broken by Goffin at 5-5 in the second set. Goffin took a 4-2 lead in the decider, then fought back from 3/5 down in the tie-break only to squander a match point at 6/5. It was Paire’s third win in four meetings over Goffin.

Paire, who is 0-4 in semi-finals this year, next meets World No. 64 Georgian Nikoloz Basilashvili, who defeated Uzbekistan’s Denis Istomin 7-5, 6-3 after saving the four break points he faced. The 25-year-old claimed his 24th match win of the year, which is double the number of victories he’d had in his career before this season.

Mischa Zverev will attempt to reach the Moselle Open final for the second time on Saturday when he plays fellow German and qualifier Peter Gojowczyk. No German has ever captured the title at the ATP World Tour 250 tournament – Philipp Kohlschreiber finished runner-up in 2009 (l. to Monfils)

Fifth seed Zverev fought past big-serving lucky loser Kenny de Schepper 7-5, 7-6(4) in one hour and 31 minutes. Seven years ago, Zverev qualified en route to his first ATP World Tour title match (l. to Simon).

Gojowczyk, currently No. 95 in the Emirates ATP Rankings, recorded his second straight win (also 2017 Wimbledon) over Romania’s Marius Copil 6-2, 6-4 in 56 minutes. He won the first four games of the pair’s second meeting for his 10th tour-level match win of 2017.

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Mirnyi Denied Milestone Doubles Win
Wesley Koolhof and Artem Sitak denied Max Mirnyi the 750th match win of his career when ‘The Beast’ partnered Philipp Oswald. Koolhof and Sitak won 6-4, 3-6, 10-7 in 74 minutes for a place in their second team final (2017 BB&T Atlanta Open, l. to Bryans).

They will challenge a French pair, Paul-Henri Mathieu and Paire or third seeds Julien Benneteau and Edouard Roger-Vasselin, who will contest their semi-final on Saturday.

Roberto Bautista Agut reached the St. Petersburg Open semi-finals for the third successive year on Friday by sweeping past seventh seed Viktor Troicki of Serbia 6-1, 6-2 in 72 minutes. “The score looks easy, but the match wasn’t,” said Bautista Agut. “Viktor is always tough to beat, a very good fighter and serves well.”

The top-seeded Spaniard raced to a 5-0 lead in the first set, then recovered from a 0-2 deficit in the second set en route to extending his perfect FedEx ATP Head2Head record to 4-0 against Troicki, who is now 20-22 on the year.

Bautista Agut, who has already won two ATP World Tour hard-court titles this year at the Aircel Chennai Open in January (d. Medvedev) and the Winston-Salem Open in August (d. Dzumhur), is currently No. 15 in the Emirates ATP Race To London. He will next play Italian third seed and 2012 finalist Fabio Fognini or Lithuanian lucky loser Ricardas Berankis.

Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Damir Dzumhur, the player Bautista Agut beat in the Winston-Salem final, continued his fine run of form. The 25 year old recovered from 0-2 in the deciding set to beat first-time ATP World Tour quarter-finalist Liam Broady, a British qualifier, 6-3, 2-6, 6-4 in one hour and 52 minutes.

“It definitely feels great to be in the semi-finals – another great week for me,” said Dzumhur. “It was a tough match, but at the end I pulled out some good shots and defended well.”

When asked what the key to his run of form was, Dzumhur – 25-7 at all levels since 19 June – admitted, “I wasn’t playing badly at all, but I couldn’t find what was missing in my game. When I came to the hard courts of Los Cabos, I felt so much more confident than before. I feel that confidence came from practising a lot and after a few good wins, I am playing my best tennis in the past five weeks.” He is through to his third tour-level semi-final of the season.

Dzumhur will next play eighth seed Jan-Lennard Struff of Germany on Saturday. Struff denied second-seeded Frenchman Jo-Wilfried Tsonga his 30th match win of the year after the German recovered from a set and 1-3 deficit to triumph 3-6, 6-3, 6-2 in one hour and 49 minutes. Tsonga, who has recorded 30+ victories from 2008-16, dropped to 29-11 on the season after his first loss in four meetings against Struff.

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St. Petersburg Open – St. Petersburg, Russia

Local hopes Mikhail Youzhny and Evgeny Donskoy joined Serbia’s Viktor Troicki for the draw ceremony at Sibur Arena on Saturday, before Donskoy joined #NextGenATP Croat Borna Coric on Monday for a photo shoot at Peter and Paul Fortress, founded by Peter the Great in 1703. Coric and Donskoy took a guided tour of the cathedral and grounds before setting off the cannon to mark noon in the Russian city.

Second seed Jo-Wilfried Tsonga and top seed Roberto Bautista Agut made a trip to St. Petersburg’s Yusopov Palace on Tuesday where they were given a guided tour of the living quarters and papatial theatre. Third seed Fabio Fognini and Troicki took a ride in a horse-drawn carriage through Palace Square on Wednesday, before heading in to tour the world-renowned Hermitage Museum.

#NextGenATP Russian Daniil Medvedev, Brit Liam Broady and German Jan-Lennard Struff joined Donskoy, Tsonga and Youzhny met fans at a series of autograph sessions. Tsonga posted on Twitter after meeting fans and taking part in a photo shoot.

The hunt for an elusive Emirates ATP Rankings point — a goal shared by every aspiring professional tennis player — can be tough and costly. But once attained, the location and year of the achievement will be indelibly marked. Twenty years ago today, on Monday, 22 September 1997, page nine of the weekly rankings list contained this entry: 803T Federer, Roger.

The entry didn’t attract much attention back then, nor did that of another future World No. 1, ‘808 Hewitt, Lleyton’, just a few lines down. But Federer had taken his first step on the ladder following a four-week series of Swiss clay-court satellite tournaments in Bossonnens — culminating in eight victories and two semi-final runs (l. to Daniele Balducci and Agustin Garizzio, respectively) — to earn 12 points. Aged 16 years and 55 days, Federer could also look a little further up the rankings at No. 756, Juan Carlos Ferrero, another future leader of the sport.

“The ATP rankings is where it all starts for every player,” Federer said. “It’s about getting your foot on the ladder and seeing your name on the computer rankings for the first time. I’ll never forget that moment and the excitement I felt after that Satellite. It was the start of a long journey to the top for me. I think that’s the great thing about our sport; the rankings provide a really accurate barometer of where you stand compared to your peers. The computer doesn’t lie. It’s amazing to think that 20 years later I’m still in the game  and still with a chance to get to year-end No.1 in 2017. I never imagined having such longevity.”

Over the course of the past 20 years in the Emirates ATP Rankings, Federer has accrued a staggering 121,092 points in a glittering career that to-date includes 93 trophies and a 1119-249 match record. Now aged 36, and with two months left of the 2017 season, the Swiss superstar’s focus is attempting to make up ground on Rafael Nadal and add to his record 302 weeks at No. 1.

In September 1997, fellow Swiss Martina Hingis was at the peak of her considerable powers. Federer, 312 days younger, was already technically and tactically stronger than some of his compatriots, Yves Allegro, Michel Kratochvil, Christian Dillschneider and Severin Luthi, who, of a similar age, also competed on the satellite circuit. From the start of 1996, through his exploits at Bossonnens and to the end of 1997, Federer rose from No. 88 nationally into the Swiss Top 10.

YEAR-BY-YEAR RANKINGS RISE TO NO. 1

Danny Schnyder, brother of former WTA pro Patty, who Federer jokes “beat him as a junior as often as Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic”, believes that his childhood friend’s route to becoming a top professional player opened up when Federer started to develop his on-court temperament.

“He always had a lot of potential, but what he needed to do was convert his anger, his mental attitude — that he sometimes expressed or even felt as a junior — into a strength,” Schnyder told ATPWorldTour.com. “That’s what made the difference. Talent was never an issue, but a concern was only ever how he controlled his temperament. In controlling that, he improved fast. He converted his mental game into such a weapon, to become such a psychologically stable player and able to dominate players in the head.”

Between first working with Carter (from 1993), and then when Peter Lundgren joined the Swiss Tennis Federation in 1997, Federer’s biggest decision — with the backing of his parents — had been to move to train at the Swiss National Tennis Centre in Ecublens in September 1995. While the home-sick Federer never liked to train or practise, favouring matches, by the time he relocated to Biel two years later, when his father, Robert, was mulling over an executive position in Australia, the 16 year old finished nine years of schooling with his sights firmly set on a professional tennis career.

The family never moved to Australia. Federer soared to junior World No. 1 within a year and he also grew in maturity, helped by the fact that he shared a two-bedroom apartment in Biel with 18-year-old Allegro, where the pair watched television and played computer games (sometimes until 2 a.m.), between training with Michael Lammer and Marco Chiudinelli. His ascent up the Emirates ATP Rankings from tied-No. 803 on 22 September 1997 and into the Top 50 — at No. 48 on 6 March 2000 — was fast.

Federer played only seven ATP Challenger Tour events — 23 matches in total (16-7 record) — from his first at Geneva in August 1998 to his last, which reaped his lone title, at Brest, France (d. Max Mirnyi), in October 1999, shortly after breaking into the Top 100 for the first time. By contrast, his main rivals in the professional ranks, Nadal (34-10, 2 titles), Novak Djokovic (28-8, 3) and Andy Murray (22-12, 2) played slightly more matches on the ATP Challenger Tour.