07 February 2010
Since Peter Norfolk won his fourth Australian Open quad singles title on Saturday, British players won a further three wheelchair tennis titles on Sunday at the Melbourne Open, an ITF 3 Series tournament taking place a few minutes away from Melbourne Park, home of the year's first Grand Slam.
Marc McCarroll and David Phillipson, two of Britain's top three ranked men's players, linked up to win the men's doubles at the second of the week's NEC Wheelchair Tennis Tour events in Australia.
Andrew Lapthorne won the quad singles at the same event, held at the Albert Reserve Tennis Centre, a practice facility for the Australian Open, while pairing up with fellow Briton John Parfitt to win the quad doubles.
McCarroll returns home to Middlesex after playing three tournaments in Australia since Christmas, winning one singles title and three doubles titles. McCarrroll and Phillipson reached Sunday's men's doubles final with two straight set victories and the British second seeds produced another confident performance to see off top seeds Niclas Rodhborn of Sweden and Ronald Vink of the Netherlands 6-3, 6-2.
Straight set wins over Australia's Michael Dobbie and New Zealand's Eamon Wood put McCarroll into the semi-finals of the men's singles, but the experience of Dutch world No. 10 Vink proved too much for the British No. 3, who managed to win just two games in the match.
There was better news for British No. 2 Phillipson, who marked his 2010 tournament debut by dropping just three games en route to the semi-finals and the 21-year-old then earned one of his best individual career wins to topple Japanese world No. 18 and second seed Yoshinobu Fujimoto 6-4, 6-4.
Phillipson, whose place in the final guarantees him a new career high world ranking inside the Top 20 for the very first time, had more success than McCarroll against Vink, but the Dutchman again dashed British hopes as he went on to clinch the title 6-3, 6-3.
Lapthorne, a training partner of Norfolk's, ensured that British players would leave Melbourne with both of the week's quad singles titles after the world No. 9 marked his seasonal debut with a 6-0, 6-0 win over New Zealand's Chris Harvey in the first round.
Top seed Lapthorne went on to beat fellow Briton John Parfitt, another of his training partners, 6-1, 6-3 in the semi-finals before easing to a 6-3, 6-1 victory over Australia's Matthew Ingram in Sunday's final.
Lapthorne and Parfitt got their quad doubles bid off to a fine start, beating the New Zealand pairing of Harvey and Peter Martin for the loss of just one game. They then won their second and decisive round-robin match against Ingram and Japan's Takahiro Koga 6-1, 6-2.
Elsewhere, Britain's Philip Cochrane and Dermot Bailey both ended their Cruyff Foundation Junior Masters tournament on a winning note on Sunday in Tarbes, France, with Cochrane finishing third overall and Bailey ending the tournament in seventh place.
Cochrane beat Spain's Daniel Caverzaschi 6-4, 6-0 in his final play-off match, ending the week with three wins from four singles matches and having finished as runner-up in the boys' doubles final. Meanwhile, Bailey beat Dutchman Jeroen Staman 6-4, 6-1 in the play-off for seventh and eighth places.
Article by Marshall Thomas - Photo Marc McCarroll by James Jordan