JOHANNESBURG – South African doubles specialist Raven Klaasen is eyeing a run into the latter stages of the French Open after getting through the first round.
Klaasen along with American partner Rajeev Ram beat French duo Kenny de Schepper and Vincent Millot 7-6 6-2 on Tuesday.
“All in all, it was a good performance but we will need to build on that if we want to go deep this week,” said Klaasen, who's ranked 13th on the ATP men’s doubles rankings.
“Now we have a couple days off to re-evaluate and hopefully we can make a big push into the second week of this event.”
Though Klaasen and Ram won their match by a fairly comfortable scoreline, they had to negotiate a slow start to their campaign on clay.
“I’m pretty happy with our performance. It was always going to be difficult to play against a local team with a lot of support and passion," he said.
"Things got off to a bit of a slow start in the beginning. We probably would have liked to close that set out earlier than having to go to the tiebreak.
“That’s Grand Slam tennis though, and we were happy to get over the hump there. Then we settled down in the second set and found our games and that went more according to plan.”
Klaasen and Ram will face Roman Jebavy and Jiri Vesely both of Czech Republic in the next round.
Excited to get things today @rolandgarros. First up at 11, lets go! #rg17 #paris #headtennis
A post shared by Raven Klaasen (@ravenklaasen) on May 29, 2017 at 10:06pm PDT