If Lulu Sun and Katherine Sebov were exhausting, they were no more so than Kiranpal Pannu and Nicaise Muamba, as the two men battled through a ton of rallies in their match in Edmonton as well. I didn’t score this one, although I would have if Sun and Sebov had finished before it started, but by the time they got to the end of the second set I was struggling to stay awake, so decided that discretion was the better part of valour and headed to bed.
Pannu had a couple of break points in the second game, and was facing one of his own in the fifth, but it wasn’t until Muamba was serving to force a tie-break that there was an actual break of serve. He hit a backhand into the net to go to 0-40, and saved one break point by forcing Pannu to hit his next return there as well, but he pulled a forehand volley into the tramlines to lose the set after 59 minutes.
Pannu was down 0-40 in the third game of the second set, but won the five points he needed to hold, and then broke Muamba’s serve to love. The big Canadian wild card broke back in the seventh game, and the remaining games all went with serve. Muamba hit two double faults in the tie-break to be down 2-5 after the first change of ends, but won the next four points to have a first set point. Pannu held his first serve before losing a wonderful 21 shot rally when he hit a forehand into the net. As if that wasn’t enough, the rally on the next point went for 18 shots before Pannu’s final backhand missed the sideline by the proverbial cat’s whisker. The set had taken an hour and 18 minutes.
Pannu broke straight away in the final set, and it wasn’t until the eighth game that Muamba was able to break back. He lost his last regular game with a double fault, leaving Pannu to serve out the match, and the New Zealander duly obliged. He lost just one point on the way to a 7-5, 6-7 (6), 7-5 victory, the match taking three hours and 16 minutes.