British pair are happy to accept their lucky break

BRITISH pair Colin Fleming and Ross Hutchins have matched their Wimbledon achievement by reaching the quarter-finals of the men’s doubles at the US Open after opponents Marcel Granollers and Marc Lopez pulled out.

Their third-round match was not due to be played until today but the news did not come as a surprise after Granollers retired during his singles clash on Saturday with a stomach muscle problem.

Scot Fleming said on Twitter: “Just found out Granollers has also withdrawn from doubles so we get a walkover into the quarters. Wishing him a speedy recovery. A bonus for us of course. Perhaps we were due a break as this is only the 6th tourny we’ve played in 2011 where 1 of us hasn’t been injured!”

In the last eight the pair will play either fifth seeds Rohan Bopanna and Aisam-Ul-Haq Qureshi or Paul Hanley and Dick Norman.

Fellow British duo Jamie Delgado and Jonathan Marray will meet sixth seeds Mariusz Fyrstenberg and Marcin Matkowski in the third round today.

Meanwhile, Serena Williams’ father has said he thought his daughter was going to die when she was rushed to a Los Angeles hospital in March with a blood clot in her lung.

“I thought she was going to die,” he said. “I don’t even know how she lived through it.”

But Serena said she was strangely relaxed during her health crisis. “I was actually really calm. I didn’t want to alert my parents or my family or anything,” she told a news conference after beating Victoria Azarenka 6-1 7-6 at the US Open at the weekend. “I got really, really calm and just relaxed. I think that’s the calmest I’ve ever been in my life, just trying to be strong for everyone else.”

Doctors discovered the blood clot after she had travelled to New York for treatment on a foot injury. The 29-year-old badly cut her foot on broken glass at a restaurant in Germany after she won last year’s Wimbledon title and underwent two operations because of complications with the injury.