Alcaraz stunned by Lehecka in QF

 

 

Carlos Alcaraz lost for just the second time this year on Thursday when 25th-ranked Jiri Lehecka beat him 6-3, 3-6, 6-4 in the quarter-finals of the Qatar Open. Alcaraz’s only other defeat in 2025 was to Novak Djokovic in the Australian Open quarter-finals. The 21-year-old Spaniard, ranked No 3, won the Rotterdam Open earlier this month. “I’ve talked with my team, with my coach, and honestly I don’t know what I could have done better,” Alcaraz said in a press conference. “Honestly, I don’t know. It was kind of a difficult feelings, I guess. I have to give credit to him as well, because when he was down, especially in the third set, he didn’t give up.” Alcaraz led 4-2 in the third set and had a break point on Lehecka’s serve, but couldn’t finish off the Czech, who won the next three games to advance to the semi-finals. The 23-year-old Lehecka will next play eighth-seeded Jack Draper, who knocked-out Matteo Berrettini 4-6, 6-4, 6-3.

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The match was up and down since the beginning,” Lehecka said after beating Alcaraz. “So for me to win a match like that against a player like this is a super big achievement. I believed in myself. I knew that I had the level to produce that kind of tennis. “I didn’t back down,” he continued. “I wanted to push him to his limits. The way I trusted my game was the key today.” Sinner is out of a Las Vegas exhibition LAS VEGAS, Feb 21 (AP) JANNIK Sinner has been dropped from an exhibition event in Las Vegas next month while the No 1-ranked men’s tennis player is serving a three-month ban connected to a pair of failed doping tests. Instead of Sinner, Casper Ruud is now slated to join Alexander Zverev, Taylor Fritz and Tommy Paul on March 2 as part of the MGM Rewards Slam at Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino.

 

The switch was announced Thursday in a news release that said Sinner “will not play following his recent suspension.” Last weekend, Sinner accepted the punishment as part of a settlement with the World Anti-Doping Agency. WADA had appealed a decision last year by the International Tennis Integrity Agency to fully exonerate Sinner for what it deemed to be an accidental contamination; he tested positive twice in March 2024 for trace amounts of an anabolic steroid. , then explained later that a cream one of his since-fired staff members purchased — and gave to another member of the entourage, who massaged Sinner — contained the banned substance clostebol. Under his settlement, Sinner — a 23-year-old from Italy — will be sidelined until early May and can return to competition at the Rome Masters in his home country.