2010 Rakuten Japan Open: Radek Stepanek reaches the quarters
Radek Stepanek registered his name as the first player to successfully make his way into the quarterfinal of the 2010 Rakuten Japan Open on Wednesday after getting the better of his Swiss opponent Marco Chiudinelli in three sets. The final match score was
5-7, 7-6 and 4-1.
The Czech won on Wednesday after his opponent withdrew as a result of a back injury on Wednesday. Marco, who triumphed in their last meeting earlier this season during the month of August, won the opening set of the match comfortably under the sun before
calling for a medical break after tweaking his back.
The Swiss was given a massage treatment during the timeout which looked to have done the trick until he lost the set with a badly placed double-fault in the tiebreak.
The decisive set was one-way traffic and Marco threw in the towel to spare himself further injury on the fast hard surface on Wednesday. Stepanek fired a total of twelve aces in his two hours and twenty four minutes of play.
He was sidelined for almost three months as a result of mononucleosis earlier this season. Radek made his way into the final of the Brisbane International earlier where he was defeated at the hands of his American tennis foe, Andy Roddick in straight sets.
He currently enjoys a match record of 12-11 on the season.
Top seed Rafael Nadal was given a day off after smoothly winning his first match of the competition on Tuesday at the Japan Open in Tokyo.
Jarkko Nieminen from Finland, who earlier got the better of last year’s winner Jo-Wilfried Tsonga in the first round of the competition, will play Daniel Gimeno-Traver of Spain later in the day.
Former Tokyo finalist Richard Gasquet will meet Dmitry Tursunov from Russia where Thailand Open champion Guillermo Garcia-Lopez will take on Feliciano Lopez in an all Spain battle on Wednesday.
In other action, Shahar Peer made her way into the quarter final round at the WTA China Open in Beijing, getting past her Serbian tennis foe, Bojana Jovanovski in the opening clash of the day in two sets. The final match score was 6-1, 6-2. The clash concluded
in a time period of fifty nine minutes in Beijing.
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