BRITAIN’S Peter Norfolk and Lucy Shuker will both contest wheelchair tennis finals at the Australian Open after winning their respective quad singles and women’s doubles matches at Melbourne Park yesterday.
World No 1 ranked quad player Norfolk recovered from a second set slump to beat world No 2 David Wagner of the United States 6-2, 0-6, 6-3 and remain unbeaten after his first two round-robin matches.
Norfolk plays Sweden’s world No 3 Johan Andersson in his third and last round-robin match today.
With the top two players after the round-robin phase going through to Saturday’s quad singles final, Norfolk could still meet Wagner again as the Briton bids for his fourth Australian Open title.
The two-time Paralympic champion reeled off the last four games of the first set before winning just 11 games throughout the second set against Wagner.
However, a run of four games saw Norfolk take a commanding 5-2 lead in the decider and he eventually sealed victory on his third match point.
In the women’s doubles, British No 1 Shuker and her Australian partner Daniela di Toro reached their second Grand Slam doubles final after a comfortable 6-1, 6-1 victory over Germany’s Katharina Kruger and Annick Sevenans of Belgium.
Second seeds Shuker and di Toro, runners-up in the 2009 Wimbledon Women’s Wheelchair Doubles, secured early breaks in both sets of their semi-final before then dropping their only games of the contest.
But they went on to triumph with few problems and will now play Florence Gravellier of France and Aniek van Koot of the Netherlands in the final, with Shuker bidding for the first Grand Slam title of her career.
