New York, Sep 6 (IANS) It turned out to be the perfect day for India’s Leander Paes and Mahesh Bhupathi at the US Open tennis tournament as they cruised into the quarterfinals of the mixed doubles and pre-quarterfinals of men’s doubles with their partners at Flushing Meadows here.
Bhupathi and Mark Knowles of Bahamas, seeded third, took an hour and 15 minutes to prevail over Americans Jesse Levine and Ryan Sweeting 7-5, 6-2 in the men’s doubles second round Saturday. They will face unseeded Yen-Hsun Lu of Chinese Taipei and Dudi Sela of Israel in the pre-quarterfinals.

Bhupathi then turned up with his new mixed doubles partner Liezel Huber of US to outclass another American pair Jill Craybas and Eric Butorac 6-3, 6-3 in the second round. The top seeded Indo-American pair showed fine touch as they converted all their four break points to wrap-up the match in 54 minutes.

Paes and Lukas Dlouhy of Czech Republic, seeded fourth sailed past Spain’s Nicolas Almagro and Ruben Ramirez Hidalgo 6-2, 6-3 in the second round men’s double’s match. The pair converted four of the six break points to advance in 59 minutes. The French Open champions will now face Austrian Julian Knowle and Jurgen Melzer. Paes won the doubles title here in 2006 with Martin Damm and reached the finals last year with Dlouhy.

Paes partnering Cara Black of Zimbabwe in mixed doubles defeated Italian Flavia Pennetta and Dusan Vemic of Serbia 6-4, 6-4 in 74 minutes in the second round. The second-seeded pair will take on seventh-seeded Australian Rennae Stubbs and Sweden’s Robert Lindstedt in the quarterfinal.

Sania Mirza and Daniel Nestor of Canada will take on Americans Carly Gullickson and Travis Parrott in mixed doubles second round Sunday. Sania is out of the singles and doubles competition.