Very nice set of results so far. Slabba continues to pick up the results in the 1st round at these tournaments, but now the big test to see if he can take that next step and make the quarters. He has a big chance here.

I take Josh to beat Ward.

Splendid couple of results from Slabba and Chris. All the guys are featured tomorrow, one way or another, so if Beijing becomes boring  there'll be something else to keep an eye out for.

Have to admit when I first saw Wednesday's order of play with both Slabba and Eaton playing singles I just presumed that rain had meant there was no play today, especially as the singles draw hadn't been updated.

But great wins for the boys today, with Eaton beating Amritraj in his back yard, and Slabba pulling off a tight first round win against Cakl (and I think that keeps his record of never losing in a challenger first round going for another week)

Hope one of them can reach the QF's, and it would be great if they both could and guarentee us a semi finalist.

Slabba should beat Motomura if he plays well, but that's not a guarentee, and Motomura is in a bit of form at the moment, while Eaton has an interesting match against the world junior number 1, which I'd hope he'd win, but Yang is a good player and pushed Umdomchoke to a 3rd set breaker last week.

ForeverDelayed wrote:

---

But great wins for the boys today, with Eaton beating Amritraj in his back yard, and Slabba pulling off a tight first round win against Cakl (and I think that keeps his record of never losing in a challenger first round going for another week)

---

Definitely great results, and a bit ofa mini breakthrough for Chris, beating a decent player in a Challenger away from home.

Slabba has lost in Challenger R1s twice (to Bash-a-lot at Manchester in 2006 and to Bloomers at Nottingham last year) but if you are talking about this year, then you're right - he has played 8 Challenger main draws in 2008 (9 in the last 12 months) and won his R1 match in every one of them, and if anyone had suggested 12 months ago that he'd manage that, I think quite a few of us would have thought they'd taken too many optimism pills!

Of course, it would also have seemed unlikely that a player with 8/8 Challenger R1 wins this year would have a 1/8 record in R2 matches (2/9 if you include last November's win against Bloomers in Shrewsbury), but Slabba seems to have made a better transition to Challengers than most Brits in his position over the last few years have done.

He also has a positive W-L record in Challengers - 11-10 after his win against Cakl, even taking into account those two R1 losses from over a year ago.

The second round results are out on the ATP website. Britain has two quater finalists. Josh Goodall beat James Ward in two tiebreaks (5 and 3) and will next take on 5th seeded Miles Armstrong. Alex Slabinsky had a comfortable looking 6-1, 6-3 win over Motomura to make his second challenger quarter of the year. Unfortunately Chris Eaton did not win although he came agonisingly close to a maiden challenger quarter final. He lost in a third set tiebreak, the final score being 4-6, 6-3, 7-6(8) to Yang. Slabinsky can gain British revenge as he takes Yang on in the quarters.

Well done to Goodall for winning the all-British meeting with Ward, and I guess his experience came through in the tiebreaks, and he has found some pretty good form going into the US Open qualies.

Armstrong in the QF's is a very winnable match, and I'd be disappointed if he lost that, so 2 semi finals in a row would be a good set of results from India.

Slabba played like he can it seems today, and he got to another QF with an easy win, which makes the loss in Manchester even more bizarre, and the bottom half has opened up a bit with Klein likely to be in the semi final.

Tough loss for Eaton, as he'd probably have had match points in the final set TB and it would have been great for him to have won it, but hopefully Slabba can learn from that match and beat Yang, as Slabba's a better player than Eaton so logically should do so... a semi final would be good for him here, and would effectively be defending the points from the Nigerian futures win.

I'm backing Goodall and Slabba to reach the semi's, but I'd say Slabba would have the tougher match