Tennis

Fish, Haas advance to semis in Memphis

(AP)
Updated: 2007-02-24 08:35

MEMPHIS, Tenn. - Mardy Fish advanced to his second semifinal of the year Friday when Teimuraz Gabashvili retired from their Regions Morgan Keegan Championships quarterfinal match because of a viral illness.

Fish led 6-2, 4-1 when Gabashvili became the third player this week to retire because of a viral illness.

The fourth-seeded Fish will play defending champion Tommy Haas on Saturday. The second-seeded Haas advanced with a 6-2, 6-2 victory over Sam Querrey.

Scot Andy Murray beat Stefan Koubek of Austria 6-3, 6-2 in 61 minutes. He will play top-seeded Andy Roddick or Yen-Hsun Lu of Taipei in the semifinals.

On the women's side in the Cellular South Cup, Venus Williams was to play qualifier Ioana Raluca Olaru of Romania in the semifinals in Friday night. Earlier, Shahar Peer of Israel beat Meilen Tu 6-4, 7-5 to reach the championship.

Fish has reached the quarterfinals or better in each of his four tournaments this season and now is in his second semifinal of 2007. His serve couldn't be more effective this week. He won each point on 19 of his first serves and had 11 aces to one for the Russian who never had a chance.

"I didn't know that he was sick or anything. It didn't really look to be that way in the first set. The second, all of a sudden he called the trainer. I felt I had the match pretty much in my grasp though," Fish said.

"He called the trainer at 3-0, I just assumed it was a frustration trainer call more than anything."

Haas needed only 44 minutes to beat Querrey for the second time in as many tournaments. The German, who won here in 1999 and in 2006, has not faced a break point this week and had seven aces to only one by the big-serving Querrey.

That prompted Haas to back up a big more to see the serve well.

"Maybe then he was trying to overhit the serve. He's still a young kid. He has to figure out how to change his game up here and there. I'm sure he'll do that shortly," Haas said.

The 19-year-old Murray, who successfully defended his title last week at San Jose, rolled into his second consecutive semifinal by saving two break points on his serve. He now has won eight straight matches going back to San Jose, and he said it feels good.

"I feel like these are the sort of runs I need to go on to prove to people I can go deep in the slams and keep up play for two weeks. I haven't done that before, and I hope I can do it now," Murray said.