Nick Kyrgios followed Novak Djokovic as an injury pullout victim at the Dubai Tennis Championships yesterday as the Australian quit his semi-final trailing 6-4, 3-0 to hand Stan Warwinka a trip to the final.
Kyrgios, winner of a first career trophy last weekend in Marseille, fell victim to back problems which required treatment on court after the seventh game of the first set. The 20-year-old, ranked 33rd, now faces a quick turnaround if he’s to figure in next weekend’s Davis Cup World Group tie against the US in Melbourne on grass.
“It was a bit of a struggle, to be honest,” Kyrgios said. “(Semi-finals) was obviously a good result, but I’ve have been feeling so bad every day. I seem to have some kind of viral infection. I couldn’t really serve anywhere near my full capacity and he was playing great anyway. I was never going to be able to really make too much of an impact in the match with the way I was serving.”
The Kyrgios withdrawal came in the wake of on-form top seed and four-time champion Djokovic on Thursday. The Serb could not go on against Feliciano Lopez due to infections in both eyes which came on during the week.
Wawrinka, the French Open champion who has won his last eight finals, will face former Australian Open runner-up Marcos Baghdatis in the final today.
The Cypriot beat  sixth seed Feliciano Lopez of Spain 3-6, 7-6(1), 6-1 in the other semi-final later in the evening.
“I’m in the finals so there is one more match to play my best tennis, that’s most important,” Wawrinka said. “If you look from the beginning of the week I was not playing great at all. I was trying to find a way. I’m happy I improved this week, not playing some great tennis, frustrated during matches but still fighting and trying to find solutions.”

Thiem downs Dimitrov, Tomic advances to semis

Elsewhere, fourth-seeded Austrian Dominic Thiem won a battle of rising ATP stars, downing Grigor Dimitrov 7-5, 6-2 to reach the semi-finals of the Mexico Open.
Thiem, 22 and ranked a career-high 15th in the world after lifting the trophy in Buenos Aires a fortnight ago and reaching the semi-finals at Rio de Janeiro last week, broke Bulgaria’s Dimitrov in the opening game of the second set, and broke again for a 5-2 lead before serving out the win.
“Breaking him in the first game of the second set was maybe the deciding moment of this match,” Thiem said. “I started to play better and better and the momentum swung to my side,” he said.
Thiem will play American Sam Querrey for a place in the final. Querrey defeated 18-year-old compatriot Taylor Fritz 2-6, 6-4, 6-4. The other semi-final will pit fifth-seeded Australian Bernard Tomic against Ukrainian Alexandr Dolgopolov.
Tomic, playing his fourth quarter-final of the year, edged Ukraine’s Illya Marchenko 7-5, 7-5 while Dolgopolov cruised past Robin Haase of the Netherlands 6-3, 6-3.
In women’s action, second-seeded American Sloane Stephens defeated Japanese wild card Naomi Osaka 6-3, 7-5 to set up a semi-final clash with Belgian Yanina Wickmayer, who upset Russian Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova 6-3, 7-6 (7/3).