London: It was a bad day in office for the Indians as the pair of Mahesh Bhupathi and Rohan Bopanna, Leander Paes and his new South African partner, Kevin Anderson crashed out of the AEGON Championships after losing their respective matches, here.
While Bhupathi and Bopanna lost their quarter-final match to Max Mirnyi of Belarus and Canada's Daniel Nestor, 7-6(7), 6-4, Paes and Anderson failed to clear the second-round hurdle, going down to the Serbian pair of Janko Tipsarevic and Nenad Zimonjic, 6-2, 4-6, 7-10. The Belarussian-Canadian pair took an hour and 13 minutes to down the fifth seeded Indian duo.
While the Bhupathi-Bopanna combo failed to convert any of the three breakpoints they got, they could manage to save as many as nine out of 10 that their opponents got.
It was just one breakpoint that the World No. 1 and recent Roland Garros winners - Mirnyi and Nestor - could use to their advantage and that helped them seal the match in their favour. Mirnyi and Nestor did not drop serve during the match.
The unseeded duo of Paes and Anderson, who had come from a set down to beat Frenchmen Julien Benneteau and Nicolas Mahut 6-7(1), 7-5, 10-5 in the first round on Friday, failed to carry the momentum in the next match of the day.
Even as the Indian-South African pair started off well to win the first set comfortably, 6-2, the seventh seeded Serbian combo proved to be too strong for them in the next two sets.
The battle lasted an hour and nine minutes before the Serbians sailed into the quarter-finals of the competition.
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