ATP Tour - Safin crashes to Starace

Eurosport - Wed, 09 Jul 23:01:00 2008

Potito Starace beat Russian Marat Safin in the second round of the Swedish Open to take his second win in a row over a former world number one at the claycourt tournament.

TENNIS Potito Starace - 0

The Italian, who beat Spain's Carlos Moya in the previous round, took advantage of Safin's lack of recent claycourt practice to win 7-6 3-6 6-4 and set up a meeting with Czech fourth seed Tomas Berdych in the quarter-finals.

"I played as well as I could but it's tough to change surfaces in such short time," said Safin, who last week reached the Wimbledon semi-finals where he was beaten by Roger Federer.

Although losing by little against Starace, Safin struggled to find his game and threw his racket in anger several times.

In a night match, Berdych beat Swede Thomas Johansson 7-6 6-2.

The Czech, who lost the final here in 2005 to Rafael Nadal, grabbed a 4-0 lead in the tie-breaker and went on to clinch it 7-2. In the second set Johansson's game crumbled under the pressure of Berdych's heavy groundstrokes and hard serving.

Second seed Fernando Verdasco of Spain reached the quarter-finals without breaking into a sweat as his Swedish opponent Ervin Eleskovic retired at 6-0 4-2 with a groin injury after just 45 minutes.

Verdasco next faces another Swede in Bjorn Rehnquist, a qualifier who beat compatriot Michael Ryderstedt 6-3 7-5

Reuters

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  1. Safin is back 2 his best after watching him at wimbldeon, to beat djokicic said it all, the big man is BAcK

    From James C, on Thu 10 Jul 7:21PM

  2. unabale to rely on marat

    From chito_kezzy, on Thu 10 Jul 10:09AM

  3. Go Marat! You can take the US Open. Do It!!

    From tom h, on Thu 10 Jul 4:27AM

  4. Congrats to Starace. Can't help feeling that Marat would have been better to miss this tournament to concentrate on the upcoming hardcourt tournaments. I'm sure he would have skipped it if it werent' for the fact that he needs the ranking points as part of meeting his stated objective of being amongst the 32 seeds for Flushing Meadows (thereby avoiding the need for early-round heroics and allowing him to play himself into the tournament). Otherwise, it doesn't make sense to come from Wimbledon, play a clay-court tournament and then move directly to hard. The early exit will perhaps be welcome under the circ*mstances. (yeah "circ*mstances" is a dirty word here, just in case you didn't know - the mind boggles as some genious once said). CHEERS

    From rhymes450, on Thu 10 Jul 1:24AM
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