Lleyton Hewitt in Mumbai on Thursday

Mumbai: Second seed and crowd favourite Lleyton Hewitt had to summon all his reserves to quell the resistance of hard-hitting Boris Pashanski en route to the quarter finals of the $416,000 Kingfisher Airlines Open. The Aussie beat the unseeded Serb 7-6 (7-2), 6-2 in an hour and 42 minutes.

The rain-interrupted match, which saw the volatile Pashanski being treated for blisters on his feet, generated a few verbal volleys as well in the light of Australia’s 1-4 defeat to Serbia in the Davis Cup World Group play-off round last weekend.

Hewitt, a former world No. 1 with 26 ATP titles in his kitty including two Grand Slams, will meet Rainer Schuettler. The German beat Viktor Troiki of Serbia 6-2, 6-7 (4-7), 7-6 (7-1) in the second round.

It was the second match of the day for both Hewitt and Pashanski to make up for the backlog caused by damp weather. Both players have a similar game — a big serve, a big forehand and two-fisted backhands.

The world No. 90 often caught the 21st-ranked Aussie flat-footed with his blistering forehand and Hewitt — who was sluggish in his 6-3, 6-3 opening round victory over qualifier Ti Chen — had to dig deep to overcome the battling Serb in their first ever meeting.

Hewitt broke in the sixth game of the first set and was himself broken in the ninth. He faced four break-points in the 11th game but got out of the hole with some big serving.

The 26-year-old Aussie (nine aces) then upped the ante in the tie-breaker and carried his good form into the second set with breaks in the first and fifth games as Pashanski surrendered.

“I don’t think I played at my absolute best today. It was very humid and the conditions were very tough. But I played much better than I did in my first match,” said Hewitt, recovering from viral fever which forced him to opt out of Sunday’s Cup rubber.

Top seed and world No. 14 Richard Gasquet was in ominous form as he crushed unseeded Italian Fabio Fognini 6-0, 6-1 to set up a quarter-final meeting with sixth seed Stefan Koubek (Austria). Koubek defeated German Bjorn Phau 4-6, 6-3, 7-5.

The other quarter finals will pit fifth seed Fabrice Santoro (France) against No. 4 Jarkko Nieminen and eighth seed Olivier Rochus (Belgium) versus wild card Nicholas Kiefer (Germany).

There was bad news for Indian fans as Mahesh Bhupathi had to pull out of the doubles event because of a back injury. Bhupathi and Santoro were the top seeds in this meet. They have been replaced by Purav Raja and Vivek Shokeen.

The Kiefer-Schuettler and Sergio Roitman-Ivan Navarro pairs also withdrew. The latter’s opponents, Rohan Bopanna-Aisam Qureshi, moved into the semis.