Nishioka navigates 5 hours of rain, beats Thompson to win Atlanta title

pa href='https://www.atptour.com/en/players/yoshihito-nishioka/n732/overview'Yoshihito Nishioka/a overcame a href='https://www.atptour.com/en/players/jordan-thompson/tc61/overview'Jordan Thompson/a and more than five hours worth of rain delays to win the a href='https://www.atptour.com/en/tournaments/atlanta/6116/overview'Atlanta Open/a. The 28-year-old rallied past the fourth seed 4-6, 7-6(2), 6-2, securing his first tour-level title since 2022 at 12:37 a.m. local time Monday./p

p"This is an amazing feeling," Nishioka said. "Today's battle, it was huge coming back. I think the rain was very bad for Thompson. I just got some luck from the rain. At the end, [I was] playing amazing. Third title, which I couldn't believe at the beginning of the year, so this is an amazing feeling."/ppdiv

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The match was first suspended due to rain with Thompson leading 6-4, 4-5. Three points into the resumption of play after an approximate 45-minute delay, heavy precipitation forced the players off court, this time for more than four-and-a-half hours.nbsp;/p

pThe Japanese player battled through uncharacteristic forehand errors at the start of the match, eventually polishing his groundstrokes to outlast Thompson in baseline rallies./p

pThe lefty broke Thompsonrsquo;s serve in the opening game of the third set and raced to the finish line, extending his perfect Lexus ATP Head2Head record against the Aussie to 5-0, with all of their meetings having gone to a deciding set./p

pNishioka saved 10 of the 11 break points he faced, according to Infosys ATP Stats, to claim his third tour-level title (2018 Shenzhen, 2022 Seoul). In the final edition of the a href='https://www.atptour.com/en/tournaments/atlanta/6116/overview'Atlanta Open/a, Nishioka became the only champion not from the United States (10) or Australia (3)./pblockquote class="twitter-tweet"p lang="en" dir="ltr"Nishioka grabs the title ????⚡️????a href="https://twitter.com/yoshihitotennis?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw"@yoshihitotennis/a claims the win over Thompson 4-6 7-6(2) 6-2a href="https://twitter.com/ATLOpenTennis?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw"@ATLOpenTennis/a | a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/AtlantaOpen?src=hashamp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw"#AtlantaOpen/a a href="https://t.co/2IOdTZZdDY"pic.twitter.com/2IOdTZZdDY/a/pmdash; ATP Tour (@atptour) a href="https://twitter.com/atptour/status/1817781997013520809?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw"July 29, 2024/a/blockquote script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"/script

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