Jack Draper finally beaten at Queen’s to end ’emotionally taxing’ week

QUEEN’S CLUB — Jack Draper’s perfect record on the grass this year came to an end as he was beaten 6-3, 5-7, 6-4 by Tommy Paul in the quarter-finals at Queen’s.

Draper, 22, had celebrated the biggest win of his career 24 hours earlier when he knocked out reigning French Open and Wimbledon champion Carlos Alcaraz.

But the British No 1 could not extend seven-match winning streak is over though and will now switch his focus to Wimbledon, where thanks to his run at Queen’s, he will be seeded in next Friday’s draw.

And Draper admitted afterwards a little wearied by the emotion of a week in which he won his first tour title and then won his first match on home turf for two years before downing Alcaraz.

“Physically, I felt good. My body’s been great,” Draper said.

“It just becomes mentally quite taxing, having to go day after day. I finished Stuttgart on Sunday, and I got here very, very late on Sunday.

“Then training and then winning again on Tuesday. Obviously the match yesterday [against Alcaraz], it felt like there was quite a lot of energy and emotion invested in that.

“I was definitely having to pick myself up. I felt quite flat at times. That kind of showed in my decision-making at certain times in the match. I played a few more sloppy shots than I wanted to.”

This was always going to be a very different prospect from facing Alcaraz, whom Draper shocked on Thursday. The French Open champion had been playing just his second match on the grass this year and had spent most of the previous week having champagne poured into his mouth by waiters in Ibiza.

Paul, who likes a beer as much as the next New Jersey native, had been in the Netherlands grinding in Rosemalen, trying to find his feet on a surface he was once told be his coach would become his favourite eventually.

The 27-year-old has many of the skills required to succeed on the tour’s most natural surface. His serve is deceptively powerful, he is aggressive from the baseline and not afraid to come forward and finish points at the net – and he even once described Tim Henman as his idol.

But it was Draper taking a leaf out of Henman’s playbook, serve-and-volleying at key moments with varying success.

It had taken Alcaraz an hour and a quarter to force a break point on the Draper serve, but Paul beat that by over an hour, returning with a venom that the Spaniard had been unable to muster on Thursday.

The American hit a forceful backhand winner to seal the opening break of the match and trigger much murmuring around Centre Court, but that was replaced by more optimistic cheers in the very next game when Paul, struggling with a gusting breeze, double-faulted on break point to bring the match back level.

But he did retake the lead more decisively in the eighth game of the match when Draper, who has vowed to play much more aggressive tennis this summer, serve-and-volleyed on break point behind a second serve that Paul hammered back at the British No 1’s feet to secure the break.

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Paul served out the first set without many obvious nerves, even though much of the match to that point had appeared to be a nervy one.

Draper has previous for nerves, but fearlessness has been a feature of his 10-day run through the Stuttgart and Queen’s draws, and he showed no visible signs of angst at going a set down, beyond an understandable mental and physical fatigue.

He rallied admirably though, pouncing on a 0-30 opportunity as Paul served to stay in the second set, thumping a forehand down the line and then being handed a forehand error to force a deciding set.

It was the 17th time this year that Draper had been forced to play a decisive third set, and to this point he had won exactly half of them. That includes a frustrating five consecutive final-set losses between February and April, a run that Draper admitted this week had hurt him – but also encouraged him that he was playing a high enough level and his luck would turn around.

It did in Stuttgart, where three of his five wins were over three sets, but the mileage of those matches started to tell and a tired service game at 3-3, finished off with a double-fault at 0-40, handed Paul a lead he never gave up.