About 300 diehard fans stayed well past midnight to watch Wimbledon junior champion Todd Reid narrowly fail to post his maiden win on the senior men's tennis tour late Monday night at the adidas International.

Reid recovered from a second-set lapse to be serving for the match in the decider before falling 6-7 (5-7) 6-2 7-5 to eighth-seeded Argentine Gaston Gaudio at the Sydney International Tennis Centre.

Gaudio is ranked 285 places higher than Reid at 21st in the world, but the 18-year-old from Sydney looked like progressing to a second-round clash with either Rainer Schuettler or Ivan Ljubicic when he led 5-4 in the third.

It was not to be, though, Reid losing three games straight when the biggest win of his promising career was in sight.

Play looked like being suspended for the night when a heavy downpour forced a 45-minute stoppage when Reid led 6-5 in the first set, with games on serve.

Gaudio, a hero in Argentina's 5-0 whitewash over Australia in the first round of last year's Davis Cup, held serve to send the set into a tiebreak.

But his nerve deserted him in the face of relentless pressure from his confident young foe, the Argentine coughing up two double-faults and then putting a backhand return into the net to hand Reid the opening set.

Gaudio, who boasted two tournament successes and a win over world No.1 Lleyton Hewitt in 2002, raced through the second set but Reid refused to surrender.

The two players traded breaks early in the decider before Reid had to contend with two straight overrules against him from Spanish umpire Enric Molina at a key stage of the match.

He retained his composure to break Gaudio again in the fifth game, only to let his more-experienced opponent off the hook.

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