Rune saves MP to survive Nishikori, advances to Tokyo SFs

p a href='https://www.atptour.com/en/players/holger-rune/r0dg/overview'Holger Rune/a saved a match point to defeat home hope a href='https://www.atptour.com/en/players/kei-nishikori/n552/overview'Kei Nishikori/a Sunday in Tokyo and continue his bid for a first ATP Tour title of the season. /p

p The No. 14 in the PIF ATP Rankings rallied to overcome two-time Tokyo champion Nishikori 3-6, 6-2, 7-5 in two hours and 16 minutes to advance to the semi-finals at the a href='https://www.atptour.com/en/tournaments/tokyo/329/overview'Kinoshita Group Japan Open Tennis Championships/a. /p

p span style="color: #000000;" dir="ltr" class="ui-provider ec bhc bhd bhe bhf bhg bhh bhi bhj bhk bhl bhm bhn bho bhp bhq bhr bhs bht bhu bhv bhw bhx bhy bhz bia bib bic bid bie bif big bih bii bij"The Dane received a time violation while facing a match point serving at 3-5 in the deciding set, but found a big first serve to get him out of trouble and recovered to move one step closer to claiming his first title of the year./spannbsp;He has reached one final this season in Brisbane, where he lost 6-7(5), 4-6 to a href='https://www.atptour.com/en/players/grigor-dimitrov/d875/overview'Grigor Dimitrov/a. /p

pldquo;His ball striking and feel on the ball was incredible and it was very challenging for me,rdquo; Rune said in his post-match interview. ldquo;I had to find another gear to be able to beat him and it was almost not enough, but I managed to find that level and find that fighting spirit to beat him.rdquo; /p

blockquote class="twitter-tweet"

p lang="en" dir="ltr"Rising to the occasion ⚡️a href="https://twitter.com/holgerrune2003?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw"@holgerrune2003/a saves match point against Nishikori to advance to the final four in Tokyo.a href="https://twitter.com/japanopentennis?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw"@japanopentennis/a | a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/kinoshitajotennis?src=hashamp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw"#kinoshitajotennis/a a href="https://t.co/UJjN0FTkEE"pic.twitter.com/UJjN0FTkEE/a/p

mdash; ATP Tour (@atptour) a href="https://twitter.com/atptour/status/1840355178178056507?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw"September 29, 2024/a/blockquote

script async="" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"/script

p The Dane struck 39 winners, according to Infosys ATP Stats, to claim victory in the pairrsquo;s first Lexus ATP Head2Head encounter. Rune also saved six of the eight break points he faced to become the fifth player to make six tour-level semi-finals this year. /p

p The 21-year-old currently sits 16th in the PIF ATP Live Race to Turin as he seeks to qualify for his second consecutive a href='https://www.atptour.com/en/tournaments/nitto-atp-finals/605/overview'Nitto ATP Finals/a. He next faces either eighth seed a href='https://www.atptour.com/en/players/ben-shelton/s0s1/overview'Ben Shelton/a or #NextGenATP talent a href='https://www.atptour.com/en/players/arthur-fils/f0f1/overview'Arthur Fils/a in the final four.nbsp;/p

p /p

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