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Monday, 6 July 2015 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
Viktor Troicki of Serbia celebrates after winning his match against Dustin Brown of Germany at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London-REUTERS
Reuters: Dustin Brown’s Wimbledon flame fizzled out in a four-set defeat by Viktor Troicki on Saturday, two days after the dreadlocked journeyman illuminated the All England Club by beating twice champion Rafa Nadal.
The 30-year-old German and his distinctive waist-length hair sent tremors through tennis when he roughed up the Spaniard with a serve-volley barrage to reach the third round, but the 22nd-seeded Troicki brought the fairytale to an abrupt end.
The Serb wrapped up a 6-4 7-6(3) 4-6 6-3 win to add Brown’s name to a group of players who beat Nadal when ranked 100 or below and then exited the tournament at the very next stage.
Following on from Lukas Rosol (100), Steve Darcis (135) and Nick Kyrgios (144), the 102nd-ranked Brown failed to build on his stunning upset and was brought down to earth with a bump on a sun-baked Court Three.
“It doesn’t make a difference if I lost today or not, no one will ever be able to take that (beating Nadal) away from me,” said Brown, the son of a German mother and Jamaican father.
Away from the grandeur of Wimbledon’s prime arenas, Brown’s serve-volley game, which had the tennis purists purring when he beat Nadal, failed to cut through the canny Troicki’s defences. Brown followed in his delivery 99 times against Nadal winning 71 points, but only managed to claim 76 of 120 serve-volley attempts against Troicki.
After losing the first two sets and briefly fighting back to reduce the deficit, Brown was broken twice in the fourth set and served an untimely double fault to end the contest.
The result means Brown, who came through the qualifiers to make the main draw at Wimbledon, must now return to the more mundane world of scrabbling together a living around the lower echelons of the tour and on the second-tier Challenger series. “Obviously it’s great to make money in a tournament like this,” Brown explained. “But then sometimes people that look at that don’t look at the bunch of weeks where we play a Challenger...
“It’s one great week. Obviously a lot of money. But there’s also so many weeks where we throw money out the window basically, just for flights and food. That’s just for us alone.” Troicki, who equalled his best grand slam performance by reaching the round of 16, will now face either Britain’s James Ward or Canada’s Vasek Pospisil.
