Tennis

Nottingham Open 2023 result: Andy Murray beats Belgium's Joris de Loore..By Michael Emons, BBC Sport.

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Britain's Andy Murray continued his fine form on grass to move into the Nottingham Open second round.

The 36-year-old won the Surbiton Trophy on Sunday and continued his build-up to Wimbledon with a comfortable 6-3 6-4 victory over Belgium's Joris de Loore.

Three-time Grand Slam champion Murray claimed his first title on home soil since Wimbledon in 2016 with his win at Surbiton last week.

He is ranked 44th in the world and is trying to secure a top-32 seeding for Wimbledon, which begins on 3 July.

"I want to go as deep as possible here to try to get close to a seed for Wimbledon," the Scot said.

"That's my goal, so hopefully I can get a bit closer. The courts here are more similar to how Wimbledon plays in the second week so hopefully I can get to the second week of that.

"It was tricky, very blustery conditions. I'm serving well and that helped me out.

"The main thing is to get as many matches played in different conditions against different types of opponents. He was a really big server but I made it through."

Nottingham Open 2023: Jodie Burrage and Katie Boulter impress to reach first WST semi-finals..By Michael Emons, BBC Sport.

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Jodie Burrage has beaten two top-80 players in Nottingham after defeating Polish world number 21 Magda Linette in the last 16 and then Magdalena Frech, 77th in the rankings

Britain's Jodie Burrage and Katie Boulter gained impressive wins to move into the Nottingham Open semi-finals.

Burrage beat Poland's Magdalena Frech 6-2 3-6 7-5 before Boulter defeated fellow Briton Harriet Dart 6-3 7-5 in the other half of the tournament draw.

It is the first time Burrage and Boulter have reached WTA semi-finals.

Boulter will face either another Briton in Heather Watson or Switzerland's Viktorija Golubic, while Andy Murray plays in the men's quarters later on.

'Really positive for British players'
"I feel I've worked so hard for this moment and overcame some tough times," said British number one Boulter.

"You could see how much it meant to get through after a really tough battle. It shows how far we have come.

"There's talk in the press about the next player coming up but I think we've shown this week there's a lot of depth in British tennis.

"Hopefully we can keep looking at that and look for the positives because it's been really positive for British players."

Boulter, 26, became British number one for the first time earlier this week, replacing the injured Emma Raducanu, and needed to defeat Dart to have a chance of keeping the position for another week.

Two early breaks of serve gave Boulter a 4-1 lead on her way to taking the first set, before she broke Dart's serve in the sixth game of the second.

Dart needed medical treatment on an injury to her right hamstring and was doing stretching exercises in between points, yet managed to break Boulter's serve.

However, after being unable to convert five match points, Boulter won to move into the final four.

Earlier on Friday, Burrage, 131st in the world, broke Frech's serve twice in the first set, but her opponent fought back well to force a deciding set.

The Briton failed to take two match points in the 10th game of the third set, but sealed the victory two games later.

"This week has given me so much confidence, especially not playing so much with the injuries I have had," said Burrage.

"To make my first semi-final of a WTA, the confidence it will give me is massive and I will take that into the next tournament.

"It was a really tough match, I'm feeling it a little bit. I would rather like to stop playing three-set matches, but if it gets me the win I have to grind through it."

Burrage will play either American Elizabeth Mandlik or France's Alize Cornet, who beat top seed Maria Sakkari on Wednesday, in the semi-finals.

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Victories for Boulter, Dart and Burrage on Thursday, following Watson's last-16 success on Wednesday, meant four British women had reached the quarter-finals of the same WTA Tour event for the first time.

In the men's competition, Britain's George Loffhagen, 414th in the world, had never previously won a match at Challenger Tour level before wins over Finland's Otto Virtanen and China's Shang Juncheng, ranked 131st and 176th respectively.

But Loffhagen could not repeat the feat in his quarter-final against fifth-seeded Dominik Koepfer, who won in three sets, 7-5 4-6 6-3.

British trio Jodie Burrage, Katie Boulter and Heather Watson all gained impressive wins to move into the Nottingham Open semi-finals..By Michael Emons, BBC Sport.

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Burrage beat Poland's Magdalena Frech 6-2 3-6 7-5 before Boulter defeated fellow Briton Harriet Dart 6-3 7-5 in the other half of the tournament draw.

It is the first time Burrage and Boulter have reached WTA semi-finals.

Boulter will face Watson after she beat Switzerland's Viktorija Golubic 7-6 (7-2) 7-5 to guarantee a British finalist.

Watson, 31, reached the fourth round of Wimbledon last year, her best performance at a Grand Slam, but received no ranking points.

Update: Nottingham Open 2023: Andy Murray beats Nuno Borges to reach second successive grass-court final..By Michael Emons, BBC Sport.

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Britain's Andy Murray moved into his second successive grass-court final with a win over Portugal's Nuno Borges in the Nottingham Open semi-finals.

Murray, 36, won the Surbiton Trophy last Sunday, his first title in Britain since 2016, and will play French qualifier Arthur Cazaux in the final.

Cazaux, 20, is the world number 181 and beat fifth seed Dominik Koepfer.

Nottingham Open 2023 results: Andy Murray beats Arthur Cazaux in final..By Sonia Oxley, BBC Sport.

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Andy Murray won the Nottingham Open for back-to-back grass-court titles to maintain a perfect Wimbledon build-up.

A week after victory in the Surbiton Trophy, the 36-year-old hoisted more silverware with a 6-4 6-4 victory over France's Arthur Cazaux.

He was then left stunned when his four children and wife delivered an even more perfect Father's Day present - surprising him by being in the crowd.

Before last week, it had been seven years since Murray had won a singles title on grass, but the Scot now has claimed two in seven days.

And he has achieved this one without dropping a set.

Murray is enjoying good form at just the right time, with Wimbledon - where he is a two-time champion - beginning on 3 July.

But these Nottingham and Surbiton titles have come at Challenger events - the second tier of men's tennis - and he will face a notable step up in the quality of the field at his next event at Queen's, which starts on Monday.

There, he will be unseeded and has been handed a tricky first-round draw against Australian seventh seed and world number 18 Alex de Minaur.

But he can take a lot of confidence into the London event with a winning streak of 10 matches on grass, with just one set dropped, and looking physically fit on the court - the importance of which, four years after hip surgery nearly ended his career, cannot be overstated.

He will return to the world's top 40 on Monday and will seek more wins at Queen's to amass enough ranking points to be one of 32 seeds at Wimbledon.


After his triumph, Murray had been telling the on-court interviewer about how he was planning to get home quickly so that he could see his children before bedtime on Father's Day.

It turned out he did not have to! The Scot was left somewhat surprised when he saw his family in the stands.

"I didn't know they were here," he said, looking a little emotional. "I had no idea they were coming.

"They came last week for the final at Surbiton, they turned up and it started raining then they had to go home for the kids' bedtime and they missed the end of the match so it's great they could come today."


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Leela Row Dayal: The first Indian woman to win a match at Wimbledon..By Meryl Sebastian, BBC News.


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Leela Row - the first Indian woman to win a tennis match at the Wimbledon - was as prolific as they come.

In his 1966 book My Contemporaries, art critic Govindraj Venkatachalam recalls meeting Row as a young girl.

"Timid and nervous, she was shy of strangers," he wrote. "Little did we realise then that this slip of a girl, would at an early age, become an all-India figure and one of the world's champion tennis players."

Born in December 1911, Leela Row was the daughter of Raghavendra Row, a renowned physician, and Pandita Kshama Row, one of the foremost Sanskrit scholars of her time.

Row was raised in India and educated at home by her mother. The family would go on to travel in England and France, where Row also studied the arts.

She began learning classical Indian dance at the age of three to improve her physical strength after a bout of malaria.

Venkatachalam met Row through mutual friends of their family and described her as "very versatile". As a young girl, she was trained in violin by a master in Paris and had a passion for the stage.

It was from her mother that Row inherited her love for tennis.

European sports had gained popularity among Indian women as part of a broader movement for emancipation, Boria Majumdar and JA Mangan write in their book Sport in South Asian Society.

In the 1920s, Kshama Row was among the first few women tennis players in the country - she won the singles title at the Bombay Presidency Hard Court Championships in 1927.

Row soon followed in her mother's footsteps, dominating the tennis circuit in the country as a singles player while also playing doubles matches with her mother.

In 1931, she won her first title at the All India Championship. She went on to win six more in the following years.

Through the 1920s and 1930s, Row frequently made news for winning matches at championships across the country.

In 1934, she became the first Indian woman to win a match at the hallowed grounds of Wimbledon with a 4-6, 10-8, 6-2 victory over Gladys Southwell of Britain. She lost to France's Ida Adamoff in the next round.

Row was back at the tournament the next year but lost in straight sets to Britain's Evelyn Dearman in the first round.

It would be 71 years before another Indian woman - Sania Mirza - would compete in the senior ladies' draw at the Wimbledon.

"She lived the kind of elite Indian life that could have only taken place in the years between the two World Wars, when the highest echelons of Indian society could simultaneously keep one foot firmly planted in the country of their birth, but another just as firmly, in the broader international networks of the British empire," writer Sidin Vadukut wrote of her in 2018.

In 1943 , Row married Harishwar Dayal, a civil servant who had represented India at the UN and was then the deputy at India's embassy in Washington DC.

Row continued to play exhibition tennis matches during her time in the US.

But by the late 1940s, she had turned to her other love - writing about and documenting art.

From her mother, who was considered a pioneer of modernism in Sanskrit, Row had also inherited her love for the language. She adapted several Sanskrit poems written by her mother for the stage.

While she was not a professional dancer, she wrote several books in English and Sanskrit on Indian classical dances.

Her book Natya Chandrika delved into the art of Indian dance and drama, while another one, titled Nritta Manjari delved into the dance sequences of Bharatanatyam.

Natya Chandrika was the first book by an Indian author to be archived by the US Library of Congress, the LA Times reported in 1958.

She also wrote a book on the origins and techniques of the Manipuri dance form, which one reviewer called "a charming introduction" to a "rich and varied treasure of classical Indian dance".

By the late 1950s, she had spent 20 years researching Indian dance forms and written five books on them. For some of these, she'd posed for the illustrations to demonstrate the form and movement.

"I want to bring out in drawings what my ancestors did in sculpture in the temples of Southeast Asia," she told the Windsor Daily Star.

In 1963, Row published a children's book she wrote by hand and bound herself. The book told the story of the mystic poet Meerabai and was based on a Sanskrit poem written by her mother. Row illustrated the story with delicate line drawings in black.

A senior librarian at Singapore's National Library called it "one of the most treasured possessions in the Asian Children's Literature collection", which has some of the oldest and rarest children's books from Asia.

Row and her husband were "passionately fond of the high mountains," she wrote in volume 26 of the Himalayan journal. So the couple were happy when Dayal was posted as India's ambassador to Nepal in 1963.

During her time there, she'd write about the country's art and architecture.

Row would often go on treks to the mountains, sometimes with her husband or alone.

"It was always some political crisis which prevented us making the trips or returning earlier than expected," she wrote.

On a trek in the Khumbu region of Mount Everest, Row writes of visiting the Thyangboche monastery - "the first visit of an Indian woman" - and the pleasure of seeing Mount Everest every day.

She called trekking up the Taboche ridge "the biggest thrill of my life".

"My life's dream has been fulfilled," she wrote in the journal.

Dayal died in 1964 while the couple was on another trip to the Khumbu region.

There is little information on how and where Row spent her last years and on her surviving family members.

She was last mentioned The Times of India in 1975 when a bird sanctuary in France exhibited her paintings on Himalayan fauna.

Despite her extraordinary accomplishment, there is little research on Row's life, making her far from a household name in India.

Queen's 2023 results: Cameron Norrie and Ryan Peniston win but Dan Evans loses at Cinch Championships..By Jonathan Jurejko, BBC Sport at Queen's.


Cameron Norrie marked his first appearance on the British grass courts since last year's Wimbledon semi-finals with a confident win at Queen's.

British number one Norrie beat Serbia's Miomir Kecmanovic 6-4 7-6 (7-5) on the first day of the competition.

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Ryan Peniston, who reached the quarter-finals last year, shocked 37th-ranked Frenchman Ugo Humbert 6-4 6-2.

But Dan Evans was unable secure a hat-trick of home victories as he lost 6-4 7-5 to American Sebastian Korda.

An emotional Evans said afterwards he was "embarrassed" by a run of six defeats in seven matches, admitting he was lacking confidence and not looking forward to playing Wimbledon.

A busy day for the British contingent ended when 167th-ranked Jan Choinski - like Peniston, a player given a wildcard - lost 6-4 6-2 to Italian sixth seed Lorenzo Musetti.

Andy Murray and Cameron Norrie will also team up in the men's doubles competition later in the week.

Birmingham Classic results: Katie Boulter loses to Zhu Lin..Harriet Dart beats Jodie Burrage.

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Britain's Katie Boulter reached a career-high ranking of 77 after winning the title in Nottingham

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British number one Katie Boulter suffered a first-round defeat at the Birmingham Classic, two days after winning her first WTA Tour title.

Boulter, on the back of her fine Nottingham Open triumph, lost 7-5 7-5 to China's Zhu Lin.

Harriet Dart later came out on top in an all-British match against Nottingham runner-up Jodie Burrage.

Dart beat Burrage, who was bidding to replace Boulter as British number one, 4-6 6-2 7-5.

Burrage could have replaced Boulter at the top of the rankings had she reached the final, but appeared to struggle with cramp in the final stages of the third set.

Birmingham is one of a number of British grass-court events held before Wimbledon, which begins on 3rd July.