Britain’s Neal Skupski and American Desirae Krawczyk retain mixed doubles title

Britain’s Neal Skupski and American Desirae Krawczyk successfully defended their mixed doubles title at Wimbledon with victory over Australian duo Matt Ebden and Sam Stosur.

Skupski and Krawczyk claimed a 6-4 6-3 win on Centre Court to become the first pair since Cyril Suk and Helena Sukova 25 years ago to win back-to-back mixed titles at Wimbledon.

It is a second grand slam crown for 32-year-old Liverpudlian Skupski and a fourth for 28-year-old Krawczyk, who also won the French Open and US Open titles last year with Britain’s Joe Salisbury.

Ebden will have another chance to claim a title in the men’s doubles after he and Max Purcell staged a remarkable comeback to defeat world number one pair Salisbury and Rajeev Ram.

Londoner Salisbury and American Ram led by two sets to love before having five match points in the third-set tie-break, two of them on their own serves, only to fall to a 3-6 6-7 (1) 7-6 (9) 6-4 6-2 defeat.

The loss was clearly a very painful one, with Salisbury, who double-faulted on match point, saying: “We couldn’t have been really any closer to being in the final and we both just screwed it up and couldn’t get over the line.

“It’s tough. We played some bad points the rest of the match but obviously we played two bad ones on match point. Obviously there’s pressure, you’re serving to get into the final. There’s extra nerves at that moment but you’ve still got to do better than that.”

Asked how he would try to get over the defeat, Salisbury said: “Probably not play tennis for a while, not think about tennis, not watch tennis. Do something different and take a bit of time off. We weren’t going to play any tournaments for a while anyway.”

Jasmine Conway suffered a 2-6 6-2 6-1 defeat by Czech Linda