Melzer and Petzschner win Wimbledon gentlemen’s doubles title
Jurgen Melzer and Philipp Petzschner have combined to win their first Wimbledon gentlemen’s doubles title.
The unseeded pair defeated 16th seeded combination Robert Lindstedt and Horia Tecau 6-1, 7-5, 7-5 in the final in SW19.
The partnership between the two top-50 players proved a class above their opposition on centre court in the first set of the final as the lethal combination of strong performance on serve and sharp returning by Melzer and Philipp Petzschner against a team who struggled to settle into the match resulted in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it first set.
But as Lindstedt and Tecau, also playing in their first Wimbledon final both as a team and individually, found their feet in the second set, the match developed into a tighter contest, with games remaining on serve until the 12th game of the set, when French Open singles semi-finalist Melzer crushed a backhand return into the tramlines on triple set point to secure a 2-0 lead in the match for his team.
When Linstedt was broken in the 16th seeds’ opening service game of the third set – the Swede venting his anger by hitting a ball into the crowd – and consolidated the break to take a 3-0 lead in the set, the match looked to have been placed out of the seeded pair’s reach, but the Lindstedt/Tecau combination rolled the dice one last time as they broke Melzer’s serve in the sixth game of the set and level the scores at 3-3.
As had been the case in the second set though, Melzer and Petzschner waited until they had a 6-5 lead to obtain the break, and this time it secured championship point as Melzer and Petzschner were crowned as Grand Slam men’s doubles titles champions for the first time in each of their careers.
While the Austrian-German pair were not seeded at Wimbledon, they did have some form as a doubles combination heading to the All England Club after winning the doubles title at the Zagreb Indoors in February.
The duo reached the final after coming out on top of a five-set semi-final against seventh seeds Weslie Moodie and d**k Norman, who had defeated 2006 doubles champions Bob and Mike Bryan in their quarter-final match.
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