Alex de Minaur moved through to the second round at the HSBC Championships on Tuesday, but he had to work for it before Gabriel Diallo finally slipped away. The Australian beat Montreal’s Diallo 7-6, 6-3 at London’s Queen’s Club and now faces Denis Shapovalov next.
For readers searching Cameron Norrie, the immediate reason is the same grass-court stage that now has de Minaur into a match against Shapovalov. Shapovalov, of Richmond Hill, Ont., ended a five-match losing streak with a first-round win over Britain’s Jack Pinnington Jones on Monday, which set up the second-round meeting at the ATP 500 grass-court event.
The score line looks tidy enough, but the first set was decided only after a back-and-forth tiebreaker in which Diallo was forced into an unforced error while serving on set point. De Minaur then built the rest of the match around pressure on return, and his clearest opening came in the second set when he broke for a 3-1 lead.
That stretch mattered because Diallo had chances to stop it. One game dragged on for 15 minutes 25 seconds, with the Canadian failing to convert three game points before De Minaur finally took the fourth break point. It was the difference between a longer fight and a straight-sets finish, and it underlined how little room Diallo had to recover once de Minaur got his teeth into the baseline exchanges.
Diallo’s week had already been sliding before this loss. His world ranking dropped 30 points to No. 84 after he failed to win a match in his title defence at last week’s Libema Open, and Tuesday’s defeat pushed his season record to 6-15. The numbers tell the story plainly: he is still fighting for traction, while De Minaur keeps moving deeper into the draw.
Now the tournament turns to De Minaur against Shapovalov, a meeting that has already been sharpened by opposite kinds of momentum. De Minaur arrives on the back of a straight-sets win that still demanded patience; Shapovalov comes in after snapping his own skid. The next result will decide whether the Australian keeps control of the top of the section or whether Shapovalov turns Monday’s rescue into a run.
