World No. 4 from Austria seeking 18th career title at Dubai Duty Free Tennis Championships Top seed Dominic Thiem will be seeking the 18th title of his career, and his first crown since he lifted the winner’s trophy at the 2020 US Open, when play gets underway in the ATP500 week of the Dubai Duty Free Tennis Championships. The reigning Grand Slam champion and world No. 4 will be bidding to become the first Austrian since Thomas Muster in 1997 to lift the Dubai Duty Free Tennis Championships trophy. A player for the big occasion, Thiem reached the finals of the 2018 and 2019 French Opens and the Australian Open in 2020. Along with his triumph in New York, he has also reached the final of the ATP Tour Finals in the past two seasons. But he has some catching up to do in Dubai, where in his only previous appearance in 2015 he fell in the first round to Roberto Bautista Agut. Thiem will be wary of meeting the Spaniard again after the latter upset him just days ago in the Doha quarter-finals. Thiem will not be disappointed if they do meet again this week, however, as the draw means they would meet in Saturday’s final. Stan Wawrinka, the 2016 Dubai champion who was at the official player’s draw, has withdrawn from the tournament due to fatigue. Bautista Agut, who claimed the Dubai trophy in 2018, will start as a leading favorite for the title after not only beating Thiem in Dubai, but this week’s No. 2 seed Andrey Rublev in straight sets to reach Saturday night’s final against Nikoloz Basilashvili. Rublev, meanwhile, will be seeking the match play he failed to get in Doha, where he received a first-round bye and then two walkovers into the semi-finals before falling to Bautista Agut. Thiem receives a bye into the second round, where he will face one of two qualifiers from round one. Second seed Rublev will also start against a qualifier or Jordan Thompson. Third seed Denis Shapovalov will play either a qualifier or Jan-Lennard Struff. Fourth seed Bautista Agut begins against Matthew Ebden in the second round after his opponent received a Special Exempt into the second round upon reaching the semi-finals in Marseilles. Special Exempt status is given to players who have been so successful at one event that they would have difficulty reaching their next tournament in time to compete in the first round. “We anticipate another excellent week with a number of players who are worthy of winning such a prestigious title,” said tournament director Salah Tahlak. “We have given wild cards this week to Denis Novak, who recently reached the quarter-finals in Montpellier; to Malek Jaziri, who made a fantastic run to the semi-finals in 2018; to Aslan Karatsev, who at the recent Australian Open and as a qualifier became the first player in the Open Era to reach the semi-finals of their debut Grand Slam; and finally to former Dubai Duty Free Tennis Championships ballboy Alexei Popyrin, who last month won the first title of his career in Singapore.”