Julian Reister routs Guillermo Garcia-Lopez in straight sets – German Tennis Championships 2011
German Julian Reister, a wild card entrant into the bet-at-home Open German Championships 2011’s main draws continued his excellent performance and decisively ousted Spaniard Guillermo Garcia-Lopez in an important two
set victory. Reister’s win securely places him amongst the top sixteen players in the tournament, no mean feat considering his 155th world ranking. Garcia-Lopez’s currently stands at a venerable 37 on the world rankings, significantly
higher than his opponent.
Fourteenth seed Garcia-Lopez was playing his first match in the tournament because he had received a bye to the second round. Wild card Reister had earlier delighted the German crowd by outplaying world No. 70 Uzbek Denis
Istomin in their first round match. Reister and Lopez had previously met in 2006 at Basel, Switzerland. Garcia-Lopez previously led the head to head rankings but now they stand levelled at 1-1.
Garcia-Lopez fought a pitched battle against his better placed opponent in the first set. Reister recorded the first game of the set in his account by opening serve and took a lead from the onset. However Garcia-Lopez
limited his assault by successfully converting a serve break in the third game and forged ahead. However Reister recovered soon enough and fought back with a matching breakpoint in a later game. Despite serving at a lower percentage (59%) then Reister’s 66%,
Garcia-Lopez zoomed three fantastically placed aces in the first set. The closely fought set ended on a tie break which was ultimately won by the better performing Reister; who won 7 points against Garcia-Lopez’s 5. This set was the longest set of the match.
The length of the first set and its fierce nature left Garcia-Lopez visibly exhausted. He failed to perform even at par with his performance in the first set and things took a downhill for him from the start. Reister delivered
an utterly destructive serve break in Garcia-Lopez’s opening game of the set and raced ahead easily. Reister again broke Garcia-Lopez’s serve in the third game, limiting him to just 15 points in that game. The struggling Garcia-Lopez came out with a rare serve
break in the next game and the scores rose to 3-1. Reister served superbly at around 72% and won 11 of the 13 serve points that he faced. Reister delivered another breakpoint in the seventh game of the score and left his opponent trailing. The game ended at
6-2, solidly in Reister’s favour.
This two set 7-6(5), 6-2 win from a match that lasted for one hour and forty-seven minutes has propelled Reister into the next round, where he’ll play against fourth seed Mikhail Youzhny for a place in the quarterfinals.
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