LAWN TENNIS Cooper And Fraser Singles Finalists At Wimbledon

Press, Volume XCVII, Issue 28629, 4 July 1958, Page 5

LAWN TENNIS Cooper And Fraser Singles Finalists At Wimbledon

(N.Z Press Association—Copyright)

LONDON, July 2. The Australians, Ashley Cooper, aged 21, and the left-hander Neale Fraser, aged 24, both of Melbourne, today won to enter the men’s singles final of the Wimbledon tennis championships. Cooper, the top seed and Australian champion, reached the finals for the second successive year when he beat another Australian left-hander, Mervyn Rose, 7-9, 6-2, 6-2. 6-3. with a great exhibition of controlled power tennis on the centre court. On the adjacent No. 1 court, Fraser beat Kurt Nielsen, of Denmark, 6-4, 6-4, 17-19, 6-4. The 30-year-old Dane, a finalist in 1953 and 1955. battled courageously to stay in the match for nearly three hours, but the tall Australian’s greater variety of strokes proved decisive. Though Rose, who is 28, had taken the Italian and French titles this year and had battled his way through five rounds at Wimbledon without yielding a set, he could not counter Cooper’s magnificent all-round power.

Cooper, who lost to Lew Hoad in the 1957 final, blasted his way through to the final round today in an hour and 22 minutes. Frequently Rose slammed over fast services only to see them hit back with bullet-like speed. Fraser will have to tighten his game considerably if he is to check Cooper in the final on Friday. His match with Nielsen is being described as one of the most disappointing semi-finals since the war. It progressed at a pedestrian rate on service games and both men were guilty of very loose shots. Fraser looked set for a comfortable win when he took the first two sets in 45min, after snatching the only breaks in the fifth game of each set. But the powerful Dane then began to get his booming first service in with monotonous regularity and he extended the Australian to 46 more games. , . The often dreary match was punctuated by Nielsen’s complaints about the cllckln* eameraa of news

photographers and bad line decisions A particularly bad call in the marathon third set resulted in the umpire over-ruling the linesman—a rare occurrence at Wimbledon. The sun returned to Wimbledon today and the men’s semi-finals were watched by shirt-sleeved crowds. India’s Davis Cup pair, Naresh Kumar and Ramanathan Krishnan, provided the upset of the day by eliminating the American holders of the men’s doubles title, Gardnar Mulloy and Budge Patty. The agile Indians outlasted theii veteran opponents, whose combined ages total 78 years. The centre-court duel lasted nearly two • hours before Kumar and Krishnan ran out winners 3-6, 6-4, 6-2, 3-6, 7-5 to enter the quarterfinals/