Corban Crowther has secured his first ITF doubles title, and Alex Klintcharov his second, as they combined to win the trophy at the ITF Eves Open in Papamoa on Saturday, completing the match before the rain came to disrupt the day further after a delayed start. Elyse Tse and her Austrian partner Julia Grabher made it to the final of the women’s doubles, a first at that level for the young New Zealander, but found the second-seeded pair of Hiromi Abe and Shiho Akita too strong.
Abe also made it to the final of the women’s singles on Sunday morning, but young Indonesian Janice Tjen was too good, completing a hat-trick of titles after winning at Antalya in Turkey before taking the Wellington crown last weekend. The men’s singles final went to fifth seed Moerani Bouzige from Australia, who beat Japanese-Kiwi Jay Friend in straight sets. Friend is a younger version of Ben McLachlan, in that he has a New Zealand father and a Japanese mother, and he told me that he had actually played at Papamoa before. That was when he and Daniel Hammond were seven or eight years old, and they were driven down from Whangarei to play in what he can only recall as a freezing cold event.
That finished a very good week for the New Zealand players, with a couple of the youngsters putting up very good performances in their first matches at this level. Although she didn’t win, 14 year old Dorea Morina impressed me mightily in qualifying when she took seeded Dutch player Emma van Poppel to a match tie-break after nearly winning in straight sets. Una Misic also performed creditably in her debut against another young Kiwi in Lucia Gale. Of the more experienced brigade, Isaac Becroft made it to the singles semi-finals, where he lost to Bouzige, while Klintcharov, Vivian Yang and Jack Loutit made it as far as the singles quarter-finals