Doubles act Colin Fleming and Ken Skupski gave the flagging morale of British tennis a major boost – capturing their first ATP Tour title in France.

Scot Fleming and Liverpudlian Skupski, unused team members during the recent Davis Cup defeat against Poland, beat former Wimbledon champions Michael Llodra and Arnaud Clément 2-6, 6-4, 10-5 to win the Open de Moselle in Metz.

“This is our first ATP title and no-one can ever take that away from us,” said Fleming.

“But in terms of the long-term plan, the ranking points are so important because it means we’re closer to playing ATP-level events all the time, which is where we want to be,” said Fleming.

“We got off to a rough start in the final, through a combination of them playing really well and us being a little bit overawed.

“We’d played all our matches on the second court and the final was on the stadium court and it was a very different atmosphere, it was very noisy.

“We had a lot of tough matches this week – we won our second round 11-9 in the tiebreaker and we could easily have lost that one, so to win the title is amazing.”