Nice win, looked to be serving well from the last few games I watched

Sousa is on a 9-match winning streak, having won the title in Faro (a Futures event, not a Challenger), come through qualifying here and beaten the 3rd seed in R1 by a WTA-like scoreline which suggests the 3rd seed might not have been firing on all cylinders.

Stircrazy wrote:

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And a decent chance of a QF place, I'd've thought:

L16:  James Ward WR 162 vs (Q) Pedro Sousa (POR) WR 289

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Wish I'd kept my big mouth shut:  Dino had an early break in the first set, but eventually lost it by 3-6.  It now looks pretty ominous:  0-3* in the second...

Stircrazy wrote:

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Oh dear!  Dino down & out:

L16:  James Ward WR 162 lost to (Q) Pedro Sousa (POR) WR 289 by 3 &1! 

What the bloody hell happened there?

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A 1st serve disaster day by the looks of it - James got less than 50% of his 1st serves in but, far worse, he only won 42% of the points when he did het his 1st serve in.

SMC1809 wrote:

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Bookies had Sousa as 1/2 favourite, and it turned out rightly so.

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I wonder why they 'knew' - I mean, I know Sousa was having a better run of form than James, but he has been playing lower level events, hadn't beaten anyone else in the top 300 this year until this week (though he hadn't beaten a couple of top 200 players in the autumn and took a set off del Potro in Estoril last year ... the week after being beaten by Dan Smethurst in Napoli) and he is ranked at a career high that is more than 100 places below James.

I didn't think it was going to be easy, but I did make James the clear favourite. In the end, he only won one more game tonight than Matthew Short did against Sousa in Faro last month.