Botic van de Zandschulp, ranked 26th in the world, and Frances Tiafoe, ranked 27th, engage in an intriguing third-round match on Friday at the 2022 ATP Citi Open.
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Van de Zandschulp would have anticipated beating Borna Gojo, who was ranked 198th, with relative ease after receiving a first-round bye, but that wasn’t to be. The Dutchman required two tiebreakers in his three-set match against Gojo, which lasted more than three hours, to prevail. After blowing a match-point on his opponent’s service in the second set, Van de Zandschulp defeated Gojo 7-6 (6), 6-7 (5), 6-4. There were only three serve breaks in the entire match, two of which occurred in the first four games, which turned out to be an extremely cagey contest. With the exception of the ninth game of the final set, where van de Zandschulp finally had a chance to outperform his opponent’s serve, the two tiebreakers that followed.
Although the victory wasn’t as easy as Frances Tiafoe had hoped for, it was still a straight-set victory that saw the American advance to the competition’s third round. Tiafoe played against Christopher Eubanks for an hour and 24 minutes after receiving a bye in the first round. He won 6-3, 7-6. (2). Tiafoe faced just one break point in the entire match despite taking eight aces from Eubanks, and he easily avoided it. In contrast, he defeated Eubanks easily in the second set tie-breaker after breaking him twice in the first set. Tiafoe had previously advanced to the fourth round at Wimbledon and the semifinal in Atlanta, and he would be the favourite to maintain this form here.
Botic van de Zandschulp and Frances Tiafoe will face each other in the third round of the 2022 Citi open on Friday, August 5. The ATP 500 competition is scheduled to start from August 1 and end on August 7 this year.
The 2022 Citi Open will see six rounds of action excluding the qualifiers. These include the round of 64, round of 32, round of 16, quarter-finals, semi-finals and final. The tournament is scheduled to commence on August 1 and conclude on August 8 this year.
| Competition Stage | Date |
| Round of 64 | August 1 (Men’s) |
| Round of 32 | August 1 (Women’s), August 3 (Men’s) |
| Round of 16 | August 3 (Women), August 4 (Men’s) |
| Quarter-finals | August 5 (Women’s and Men’s) |
| Semi-finals | August 6 (Women’s and Men’s) |
| Finals | August 7 (Women’s), August 8 (Men’s) |
Read more: Rune vs Wolf: Citi Open 2022 Where to watch, Schedule, Dates, Live Streaming details
| Player | Seed |
| Andrey Rublev | 1 |
| Hubert Hurkacz | 2 |
| Taylor Fritz | 3 |
| Reilly Opelka | 4 |
| Grigor Dimitrov | 5 |
| Denis Shapovalov | 6 |
| Karen Khachanov | 7 |
| Botic van de Zandschulp | 8 |
