Roberto Bautista Agut held off some late resistance from Taro Daniel to register a straight-sets opening win at the Mallorca Championships on Monday and set a potential second-round blockbuster against Nick Kyrgios at the ATP 250 event.
The fifth seed was broken when serving for the match in the second set before he reeled off six consecutive points in the tie-break to recover a 1/4 deficit and prevail 6-4, 7-6(4) against Daniel in Spain.
Bautista Agut reached the quarter-finals in the inaugural edition of the Mallorca event in 2021, when he fell to eventual finalist Sam Querrey. Standing in his way of matching that run this year will be Kyrgios or Laslo Djere, who play their first-round match on Tuesday.
The Spaniard is looking to build on plenty of past success on grass — he won the first of his 10 tour-level titles on the surface at ‘s-Hertogenbosch in 2014 and reached the semi-finals at Wimbledon in 2019.
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Also on Monday, Ilya Ivashka surged to a comprehensive 6-4, 6-1 victory against Emil Ruusuvuori to book a second-round meeting with second seed Stefanos Tsitsipas.
Ivashka’s first-round victory at the ATP 250 event in Spain came on a day when he rose to a career-high No. 40 in the Pepperstone ATP Rankings. The 28-year-old celebrated with a clinical performance against Ruusuvuori, breaking the Finn’s serve four times in an 88-minute victory to extend his lead in the pair’s ATP Head2Head series to 5-0.
Tsitsipas and Ivashka’s two previous tour-level meetings have both come in 2022. The Greek claimed a straight-sets win on hard court in Rotterdam in February and backed that up with a three-set triumph on the clay in Barcelona in April.
Tallon Griekspoor made it three consecutive opening-round wins on grass with a hard-fought 7-6(3), 7-6(3) triumph against home wild card Feliciano Lopez. Griekspoor fell in the second round in both ‘s-Hertogenbosch and Halle, but the World No. 53 will attempt to go one step further than that in Mallorca in a second-round clash against Alex Molcan. The pair meet for a second consecutive week — Molcan was the man Griekspoor beat in Halle.
Third seed Denis Shapovalov’s opening opponent in Mallorca was also set on Monday. Benjamin Bonzi advanced to the second round after Chilean qualifier Alejandro Tabilo retired with the Frenchman leading 6-3, 4-2. It will be a maiden tour-level meeting for Shapovalov and Bonzi at a tournament where both are appearing for the first time.
In Monday’s other first-round clash, Swiss qualifier Antoine Bellier notched the second tour-level win of his career with a 6-3, 7-6(6) victory against Federico Delbonis.