Guido Pella conquers Adrian Ungur to claim the coveted title – ATP Challenger Tour Finals 2012 CH
Seeded seven in the tournament draw, 22-year-old Argentine contender beat all the odds to bag the season-ending finale at the ATP Challenger Tour Finals on Saturday. The 124th ranked participant stunned the sixth seeded
Romanian, Adrian Ungur, in the title match of the coveted event in Brazil. He laboured extremely hard for two hours and 31 minutes to settle the nail-biting clash in three sets, 6-3, 6-7(4), 7-6(4).
Ungur was one of the hot favourites for winning the tournament and has been in supreme form in his initial matches. He had defeated Pella in the Round Robin match with the similar sort of score line but the Argentine turned the
tables on Saturday to snatch away glory in style.
Pella took off the ATP Challenger Tour Finals in great fashion, beating the top seeded home favourite, Thomaz Bellucci, in his opening match. He suffered his only defeat of the tournament against Ungur later on but then stunned
the third seeded Romanian, Victor Hanescu, in the semi-finals to earn a title shot. He bagged the opening set with ease in the final encounter but had to face a serious resistance in the following two sets. Ungur clinched the second set tie-breaker but Pella
came back strongly in the decider to conclude his triumph in grand fashion.
“Beating Bellucci gave me a lot of confidence. It was one of the hardest matches I've ever played. Everyone was rooting against me. At the start, I was a little bit nervous, but I managed to win the match. The defeat against Ungur
put me down, because it was 7-6 in the third. Anyway, I got the spot in the semi-finals and won the title in the toughest match of my career.”
“I was attacking pretty well in the first set, but when he started serving well and it put me in a lot of trouble,” Pella told about his final against Ungur in the post-match presentation ceremony.
Winning the circuit-ending finale will certainly lift up Pella’s confidence to a whole new level in the next season. His rankings will also improve and we shall see a more determined Argentine in the 2013 Challenger Tour.
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