Eduardo Schwank sneaks past Gianluca Naso into semi-final – BVA Open 2011 CH
World No.164, Eduardo Schwank, of Argentina squared-off against the Italian, Gianluca Naso, in the quarter-final of the BVA Open Challenger tournament, contested in Brazil, on Friday October 28th. It was a relatively
easy victory for the Argentine who clinched the semi-final spot after an hour and forty-minutes with a final score of 6-3, 6-4.
It was the first encounter between the two players and both were really consistent throughout the tournament and pulled up major upsets knocking the seeded players; Schwank defeated the fourth seeded Frederico Gil in the second
round and Naso defeated the eighth seeded Maximo Gonzalez in opening round.
Naso kicked-off the match in great fashion and smashed two back-to-back aces and won the first game on his serve. The reply from Schwank was more fascinating; he won the second game on his serve and went on to break in the next
and won the third game in a row in the next.
The score was pushed to 3-1 in the favour of Schwank. Naso needed to break his opponent’s serve to balance out the score but he couldn’t capitalize on three of the opportunities provided to him and failed to make any impact.
Naso's first serve accuracy was extremely impressive but his second serves were not precise enough. One double-fault and really mediocre percentage of return points from total led to his downfall. He needed to lift the tempo of
the game to push his opponent out of his comfort zone and squeeze unforced errors from Argentine.
Start to the second set was pretty even-steven and both players capitalized on their serves and won their respective games. The breakthrough came in the seventh game when 25-year-old, Schwank, broke his opponent’s serve and clinched
the next game to take the lead of two games and pushed the score to 5-3 in his favour.
In the next two games both players held their serves which was good enough for the Argentine to register a thumping victory and send a strong message to his upcoming contestants. Naso did strike five aces in the second set and
was allotted three opportunities to break but he couldn’t capitalize on any of them and failed to push the match into the third set.
The overall difference in the stats was marginal as the Argentine sealed the win with a difference of just seven points; the main difference was created by those two crucial breakpoints at the most intense stage of the both sets
that turned things over in favour of Schwank.
Schwank now faces-off the strongest contestant of the tournament, the top seed Rui Machado of Portugal. He needs to raise his game to the next level to beat the top seed and make his way into the grand finale.
Tags: