Venus suffers a setback as Routliffe wins in Stuttgart

New Zealand’s top ranked doubles player Michael Venus has suffered a setback in his clay court campaign in the build up to the French Open.

The world number 11’s doubles partner German Tim Puetz is side lined for 2 to 6 weeks with an ankle injury suffered in the quarter final defeat to top seeds Joe Salisbury and Rajeev Ram at the Monte Carlo Masters.

It forced the pair out of this week’s Barcelona Open and Venus has confirmed they will also miss next week’s ATP tournament in Munich. Venus is unsure whether Puetz will be fit for the Masters 1000 tournament in Madrid which starts on the 3^rd of May.

“Madrid is a big one for us. I think probably he can be ready for it. But we will just wait as long as and give him as much time as he as he needs. But if it becomes the case that he can't then I will search for someone else and try and play that tournament with another partner.” Venus said.

While not ideal the Kiwi should have a choice of decent players to play with.

“Yeah, there's, there's a few guys. The cut was really quite high for Madrid. So there were a few guys in the 30s who didn't get in on their ranking, and there's always some singles guys floating around. I know there will be there will be some options. But in saying that, I'm not really thinking about it and hoping for the best Tim will be fit.”

Venus and Puetz only joined forces after last year’s French Open and still qualified as alternates for the year end ATP World Tour finals, despite playing barely half a season together. They were hoping to play a full season this year. But Puetz had to return to Germany last month to attend to a personal situation which meant they didn’t play the Masters 1000 Miami Open together.

Venus and Puetz are 7^th in the race to qualify for the year end Championship in Turin and the Kiwi concedes it is frustrating they can’t build on their strong start to the season.

It's always disappointing.  You hope to be able to have that consistency and play week in week out with each other and keep building on things. It’s been a little bit unfortunate we've been start stop and haven't been able to get quite a few weeks in a row together. But that's just how things have rolled out.” Venus said.

Meanwhile Erin Routliffe and her Polish partner Alicia Rosolska are through to the quarter finals at the WTA Porsche Grand Prix tournament in Stuttgart. They have beaten German wildcards Jule Niemeier and Nastasja Mariana Schunk 6-3 6-4. A tough test awaits Routliffe and Rosolska for a place in the semis against 4^th seeds Hao-Ching Chan from Taiwan and Japan’s Shuko Aoyama.