Tennis: Doubles to end Open - if rain stays away

The players in this afternoon's men's doubles final will again play bridesmaid.

Plans to have the Heineken Open singles final as the tournament finale were scrapped yesterday with organisers rescheduling the match between Jarkko Nieminen and Mario Ancic as first on court at 1pm.

Tournament director Graham Pearce, defending the decision, cited predictions of afternoon rain as the reason.

"We have been told there is the likelihood of rain," said Pearce. "That left us with no option but to go with the singles first."

Asked why organisers made the decision so early given the often-inaccurate Auckland weather forecasts, Pearce said they had an obligation to let the singles finalists know whether they would be playing at 1pm or later.

Doubles, traditionally the poor cousin of the ATP Tour, produced some entertaining matches given the presence of six of the eight singles seeds in six of the original 16 pairings.

Yesterday's first semifinal was won by unseeded Andrei Pavel and Rogier Wassen.

They needed a little over an hour to end the run of Czech pair Robin Vik and Tomas Zib, who got a start as the alternate when Wesley Moodie pulled out leaving Mahesh Bhupathi stranded.

Pavel and Wassen pulled away from 2-2 to take the first set 6-2.

The second semifinal was more of a see-saw battle, with both pairings dropping serve as it went to 5-5 and 6-6 before Pavel and Wassen raced home 7-2 in the tiebreaker to book a final spot in the first tournament they have played together.

Vik now contemplates a first-round singles match at the Australian Open with third seed Lleyton Hewitt. Zib will play 15th seed Juan Carlos Ferrero.

The second semifinal brought further heartache for beaten singles semifinalist Olivier Rochus when he and brother Christophe were beaten 6-3, 6-2 by top seeds and last year's runners-up Simon Aspelin and Todd Perry.

They will go into the final as warm favourites, having won two of seven finals they played together last year.

The Belgian pair kept themselves in the early stages of each set but the taxing singles match Olivier had played against Nieminen took its toll.

The brothers had to battle for too many points and rarely troubled the top seeds' advance into their second successive final here.