Jordan Thompson has made a dream Davis Cup debut and given Australia a 1-0 lead in their first round tie against the Czech Republic at Kooyong.<\/p>\n
The 22-year-old, who was called up when Australia\u2019s No.2 Bernard Tomic made himself unavailable for selection, swept top-ranked Czech Jiri Vesely 6-3 6-3 6-4.<\/p>\n
Thompson said it was the biggest win of his career: \u201dThe summer has been pretty good but playing for your country is amazing and getting us off to a 1-0 lead is even better.\u201d<\/p>\n
Thompson, ranked 65th in the world, looked right at home in the green and gold as he broke world No.54 Vesely in the opening game of the match.<\/p>\n
The Australian barely lost a point on his serve in the first set and ahead 5-3, used his main weapon \u2013 a booming cross-court forehand \u2013 to wrap up it up in 35 minutes.<\/p>\n
Vesely, who was off his game with some wild ground-strokes, had to save three early break points but Thompson hit pay dirt on his seventh of the set and again went up 5-3 before serving it out.<\/p>\n
The Czech, who beat former world No.1 Novak Djokovic last year, left the court between sets although showed no sign of injury.<\/p>\n
Thompson broke him early in the third to go ahead 3-2 but then lost concentration to hit four unforced errors and allow Vesely to level at 4-4.<\/p>\n
However the Australian hit straight back, breaking again before serving out the match with an ace to the delight of his mentor, captain Lleyton Hewitt.<\/p>\n
Nick Kyrgios, Australia\u2019s top-ranked player, faces world No.157 Jan Satral in the afternoon\u2019s rubber.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Jordan Thompson has beaten Jiri Vesely in straight sets to give Australia a 1-0 lead in the Davis Cup.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5788,"featured_media":12478,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12477","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\/12477","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=12477"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/nsw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12477\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/nsw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12478"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/nsw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/nsw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/nsw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}