Stefanos Tsitsipas cruised into the last 16 of the Barcelona Open on Wednesday with a straight-sets win over Argentina’s Pedro Cachin.
Second seed Tsitsipas, twice a Barcelona runner-up to Rafael Nadal in 2018 and 2021, needed just 78 minutes to beat Cachin 6-4, 6-2.
The Greek broke in the fifth game of the opening set and twice more at the start of the second set against his 69th-ranked opponent.
Tsitsipas, whose bid for a third consecutive Monte Carlo Masters title ended in the quarter-finals last week, will next play Denis Shapovalov.
Fourth seed Jannik Sinner beat Diego Schwartzman 6-2, 6-4 to set up a third-round meeting with Japan’s Yoshihito Nishioka.
Karen Khachanov saw off Chilean Nicolas Jarry in two sets as Bulgarian Grigor Dimitrov and Argentine Francisco Cerundolo also eased through the second round.
Britain’s Cameron Norrie thrashed qualifier Pavel Kotov 6-1, 6-2 while Australian Alex de Minaur dropped just one game as he breezed past Alexander Shevchenko.
Top seed and defending champion Carlos Alcaraz faces fellow Spaniard Roberto Bautista Agut on Thursday for a place in the last eight.
AFP
Editor’s Note
In our post on February 19, 2023, in a story ‘Woman burns self to death over failure to offset N70,000 loan’, we reported that a middle-aged woman, simply known as Mama Dada, set herself ablaze over her inability to pay back a loan of N70,000 she reportedly took from a microfinance bank, LAPO. We have since discovered that the microfinance bank referred to in the story was not LAPO Microfinance Bank Limited. We apologise to the LAPO Group for the error in the identification of the name of the said microfinance bank where the deceased took the loan. The mix-up in the name of the MFB is not deliberate.
