Rd1: M Phillips [GB] bt G Burniol [Esp][6] 5-7, 7-5, 6-2
A superb victory for Morgan over the in-form Spaniard. Burniol is ranked over 150 places higher at 457 and at the beginning of September he won a futures tournament on clay in Poland. Last week he took a set off former top 100 player Fernando Vicente. Burniol has also reached two futures finals on clay in Spain this year. They'd played once before in 2004 and Burniol won 6-1, 6-4 so it must have been nice for Morgan to get some revenge !
Rd2: M Phillips [GB] v L Rochette [Fr]
Morgan faces the 18 year old Frenchman Laurent Rochette this morning, Rochette double bagelled a Spanish wildcard in rd1. He's at a career high ranking of 804. The highlights of his year have been reaching 3 futures semis, two in Romania and 1 in Thailand. This match started at 9am GMT this morning so it should have finished by now but I can't find any result at the moment.
There are live scores for this challenger but they don't start until the main draw begins I think.
-- Edited by UltimateFlemingFan at 11:49, 2006-09-17
Can't find the score but Morgan must have lost to Rochette becasue the OOP shows Salva-Vidal vs Rochette in final qualy round.
Fiar play to him for trying all these challengers but surely he should try to win a couple more futures first and give himself a better chance in qualies!
That's a disappointing result for Morgan after such a superb rd1 win. However, Rochette is definately playing at a higher standard then his ranking of 804 suggests as shown by his final round result. He played the 2nd seed Salva-Vidal ranked 398, and only just lost 9-7 in a champions tiebreak.
I agree Johnny, I think that Morgan ought to go for some more futures, at the moment he doesn't seem to be quite ready for the challengers. In most of the Italian and Spanish futures he's winning at least one match per week and so is keeping his points tally increasing. For a lot of those futures he'd be one of the favourites to take the title. The problem with going for challenger qualifying when you're ranked outside the top 600 is that you have to have 3 superb wins and be on your best form for all three of your matches just to earn 3 points. You can have a superb victory in rd1 but then if you're slightly below-par in rd2 it counts for nothing.
Morgan is in the doubles, partnering Spaniard Francisco Fogues so he'll be able to cover his expenses. They play the top seeds Pablo Andujar and Marcel Granollers-Pujol in rd1 today at about 4pm GMT.
