The rankings indicated that Matt Donald and Jakub Nicod shouldn’t have too much trouble against the wild card pair of Evangelos Kypriotis and Stephanos Schinas in their first round match in Heraklion early this morning, and that’s the way it panned out.
Despite two double faults, the Greek pair were able to get to deuce in the fourth game, but lost the deciding point. They did break back quite comfortably three games later, but Donald and Nicod broke again, on another deciding point, and then served out the set to love after 28 minutes.
The Czech pair made it six games in a row by winning the first four in the second set, coming back from 40-0 to break in the third, and had more break points at 15-40 in the next game as well before Kypriotis and Schinas recovered to hold serve. The only blip in the all-teenage pair’s progress came in the last game, when Kypriotis and Schinas took them to 0-40 before they won the last four points to end the match after an hour and two minutes. The final score was 6-3, 6-2.