No Cowan heroics this time

At one point, Lapentti was so incensed with his treatment that after a line judge made a late call in favour of his opponent he asked her: "Are you British?"

Cowan's battling performance in that defeat against Sampras last year gave his fans every reason to believe that the Didsbury-based left-hander could close the enormous gap in world rankings between the players.

Cowan came into the Court Three match as the World No251 while Lapentti is the 22nd seed even though he is considered more of a threat on the slower surfaces.

Given the key role Lapentti played in defeating Britain in the Davis Cup at Wimbledon two years ago, he had already proved he could perform on his least favourite surface and reinforced the point today.

The strong sunshine initially brought the best out of Cowan against an opponent who was lucky to survive a five-set examination from Jamie Delgado in the opening round but the clouds of doubt started to gather over the Liverpool football fan as the third and fourth sets arrived. It was in stark contrast to the start of the contest.

Then Cowan, hampered by glandular fever and a consequent loss of confidence following the heroics against Sampras, had proved he was back to his best by breaking Lapentti in the third game.

Lapentti then suffered his first problem with officials when the umpire overruled a line judge call and awarded Cowan an ace when he was a trying to avoid break point.

Lapentti threw way another chance before Cowan held to the delight of the partisan crowd. Cowan, making his seventh wild card appearance, broke again in the eighth game with a superb back hand down the line and although the Ecuador No1 broke back immediately, there was no way back into a set Cowan had controlled.

Cowan wasted his first set point when Lapentti's return barely crossed the net after he broke a string making the shot.

He then served into the body of Lapentti who couldn't get it back and the set was Cowan's after an impressive 36 minutes of serve and volley tennis.

Lapentti's anger was rising along with the temperature and he was unhappy with a late line call and eventually lost his opening serve of the next set and slammed his racket into the top of the net as Cowan went ahead.

He then asked the line judge who had made the late call if she was British and that appeared to release a lot of the pent up anger as Lapentti broke back to silence the crowd.

Lapentti was only getting 38 per cent of his first serves into court at this point and had totally ignored the use of the lob despite Cowan's constant net rushes and the only consistent feature of his game was the constant noise of strings breaking.

By the third game the second set, Lapentti had already had to replace three rackets but, it didn't hamper his fightback.

Lapentti, aided by six double faults from Cowan, took the second set 6-4 and then moved up a gear to show the spectators why he is ranked so much higher than his opponent.

The passing shots started to fizz past Cowan as his footwork became laboured and he never threatened to initiate the fightback the crowd were hoping for in match that ended after two hours 26 minutes.

Meanwhile, Enqvist , who destroyed Britain's Arvind Parmar in the first round, found that experience did not prepare him for the power of Philippoussis who is coming back into the sport after three knee operations.

The Australian, who has reached the Wimbledon quarter-finals for the last three years, is the most dangerous wild card since Goran Ivanisevic - and we all know what he achieved last year.

Philippoussis could meet American star Andre Agassi in this year's fourth round of the tournament.