Australian qualifier Matt Barton hopes to use his stunning Wimbledon appearance as a springboard for his burgeoning career despite being crushed under an avalanche of aces from John Isner.<\/p>\n
Barton, who briefly retired two years ago with a troublesome knee injury, pushed Isner to three tiebreaks in their second round clash on Friday but was unable to get the best of the American, who sent down 43 aces to win 7-6(8) 7-6(3) 7-6(8) in two hours and 17 minutes.<\/p>\n
Despite the loss, Barton pocketed \u00a350,000 ($A89,500) and a provisional rankings boost to a career-high No.187 following his first-round win over France\u2019s Albano Olivetti.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s obviously been a great experience. It\u2019s a dream come true, and to win a match first round was great,\u201d Barton told AAP<\/em>.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m disappointed but I feel like I\u2019m at a pretty good level with my game and if I can keep chipping away I\u2019ll hopefully come up with some more good results.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is just some icing on the cake for me. Hopefully I can get a main draw wild card at the Australian Open.\u201d<\/p>\n Barton remarkably dropped serve just once through eight sets in his two matches, but crucially it came when he was serving for the third set following an untimely 90-minute rain delay.<\/p>\n Barton produced four double faults \u2013 of his seven for the match \u2013 to gift the 18th seed a break and allow him to force another tiebreak.<\/p>\n He felt that had the rain not arrived, he would\u2019ve closed out the set and believes he\u2019d have been well placed to trouble Isner.<\/p>\n \u201c(The rain) wasn\u2019t ideal. I was feeling good with my serve then the rain delay came,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cI didn\u2019t expect to do those double faults, but that\u2019s tennis.\u00a0I would\u2019ve had a lot of momentum going into the fourth.<\/p>\n \u201cIf I could\u2019ve jagged that, he would\u2019ve been a lot more tired in the fourth set I reckon. And anything could\u2019ve happened from there on.\u201d<\/p>\n Having saved two match points in the tiebreak, Barton had no answer to an unreturnable Isner serve which sent the big man into the third round, where he will face French 12th seed Jo-Wilfried Tsonga.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Australian qualifier Matt Barton hopes to use his stunning Wimbledon appearance as a springboard for his burgeoning career despite being crushed under an avalanche of aces from John Isner. Barton, who briefly retired two years ago with a troublesome knee injury, pushed Isner to three tiebreaks in their second round clash on Friday but was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5788,"featured_media":11872,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11870","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/nsw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11870","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/nsw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/nsw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/nsw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5788"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/nsw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11870"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/nsw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11870\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/nsw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11872"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/nsw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11870"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/nsw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11870"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/nsw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11870"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}