Bingham’s David Phillipson has returned to the British No. 2 men’s ranking this week after winning the men’s doubles and narrowly missing out on the men’s singles title at last week’s Israel Open Wheelchair Tennis Championships in Tel Aviv.
Phillipson’s doubles success came with fellow London 2012 Paralympian Marc McCarroll, the player he replaces as British No. 2 this week, despite McCarroll having denied Phillipson the singles title at the ITF 2 Series tournament.
After a first round bye, top seeds McCarroll and Phillipson reached the doubles final for the loss of just four games and then produced another confident effort to beat Polish second seeds Kamil Fabisiak and Piotr Jaroszewski 6-3, 6-4 to claim one of four Israel Open titles won by players on the Tennis Foundation’s Wheelchair Tennis Performance Programme.
Phillipson went into the men’s singles as second seed and after another first round bye he won his opening match 6-0, 6-0 before dropping just three games to Russian seventh seed Yuriy Golovin in the quarter-finals and to fourth seed Laszlo Farkas of Hungary in the semi-finals.
A hotly contested final saw Phillipson recover from being edged out of the first set to take a 5-2 lead in the third and deciding set, but McCarroll fought back and saved two match points before finally wrapping up a 7-5, 3-6, 7-5. Nevertheless, Phillipson has moved up five places to No. 17, one place ahead of McCarroll, in the men's singles world rankings published this week by the International Tennis Federation.
“We’ve both played better than we played in the singles final and I just couldn’t finish it off, but altogether it’s been a good week and it’s only my second tournament of the season, so there’s much more to come from me and it’s good to be moving back up the rankings,” said Phillipson.