Bopanna makes 1st Grand Slam semi-final since 2015 Wimbledon

Paris: India's Rohan Bopanna reached his first Grand Slam semifinal in seven years after he and his Dutch partner Matwe Middelkoop rallied to beat Lloyd Glasspool and Henri Heliovaara in the men's doubles quarterfinals of the French Open, here.

The Indo-Dutch pair eked out a 4-6 6-4 7-6 (3) win over the British-Finnish combination in a hard-fought contest on Monday night.

Bopanna last reached the semifinals of a tennis Major at the 2015 Wimbledon Championships when he had teamed up with Romania's Florin Mergea and lost in a gruelling five-setter to Jean-Julien Rojer and Horia Tecau.

Bopanna, 42, and Middelkoop, 38, will face 12th seeds Marcelo Arevalo and Jean-Julien Roger on Thursday in the last four.

Bopanna and Middelkoop lost the opening set but dished out a superb fightback to win the next two to emerge victorious.

The loss of one set by a player is normally not the stuff of headlines at a Grand Slam tournament.

That did constitute news at the French Open, because the player was No. 1-ranked Iga Swiatek and it had been more than a month since that happened to her.

The way it came about was noteworthy, too: She led the first set of her fourth-round match against 74th-ranked Zheng Qinwen of China 3-0, then 5-2, and was a point from claiming it on five occasions but could not seal the deal. Swiatek entered the day having won 20 sets in a row, and 48 of her preceding 49.

All that truly mattered, in the end, was that 2020 champion Swiatek would not lose another set on this cloudy evening, getting past the hard-swinging Zheng 6-7 (5), 6-0, 6-2 to return to the quarterfinals at Roland Garros and run her winning streak to 32 consecutive matches.