Andreas Haider-Maurer dismisses Filippo Volandri in second round – SkiStar Swedish Open 2011
In another second round match on a very damp Thursday, Austrian Andreas Haider-Maurer met with Italian Filippo Volandri to compete for a place amongst the top eight in the 2011 SkiStar Swedish Open. Haider-Maurer breezed past Volandri
6-3, 7-6(7) in the rain interrupted match which lasted for almost an hour and thirty five minutes.
Volandri got lucky in the first round when fifth seed Tommy Robredo had to bow out of the tournament because of a thigh injury, leaving Volandri to proceed unchallenged to the next round. Andreas Haider-Maurer meanwhile had to
fight off the Kazakh Mikhail Kukushkin 7-5, 6-2 to proceed to this round of the tournament.
Volandri versus Haider-Maurer was only the second match that was able to reach a conclusion that day because of deteriorating weather conditions. The rest of the scheduled second round matches have been postponed till Friday.
The first set opened with Haider-Maurer serving and the scores steadily built up to the 3-3 mark. However, the Austrian registered a back breaking serve soon thereafter and raced on ahead of Volandri. Despite a low first serve
accuracy Haider-Maurer was able to pick up 17 of the 19 serve points which mattered. He also bagged 50% of the break points and secured a swift 6-3 win in the set.
The second and considerably longer set began upon Volandri’s serve. Conceding a point to Haider-Maurer on his first serve game, Volandri woke up and barged from that point on, eventually going down fighting. He displayed a far
superior first serve accuracy of 74% in comparison to his opponent whose accuracy was 52%. However it was Volandri’s inability to more points off his serves which eventually cost him the set and the match. He grabbed only 19 of his 31 service points.
Haider-Maurer registered two serve breaks in games 9 and 11 to lead the game into a tiebreak. Performing when it mattered, Haider-Maurer bagged 9 points against Volandri’s 7 and won the tiebreak and effectively the match.
The Austrian will face his toughest competition yet at Bastad because for his next match he will be pitched against second seed David Ferrer. World No. six David Ferrer, hot on the heels of the Davis Cup win, took his Swedish campaign
off to a flying start by easily overpowering Spaniard Pere Riba in a second round match.
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