Leonardo Mayer battles past Daniel Munoz-De La Nava into 2nd round – Sao Leopoldo Challenger 2011
Leonardo Mayer of Argentina met Daniel Munoz-De La Nava of Spain in the first round of the Sao Leopoldo Challenger tournament, played in Brazil, on Tuesday November 1st. The match ended in the triumph for the fourth
seed Argentine with a score of 6(3)-7, 7-5, 6-2 in two hours and fifty-minutes.
Both players were squaring-off for the second time and Argentine had his revenge after three years. He was in magnificent form and was hot favourite to win the match. Considering several slips ups of his opponent in his past three
games, everything was favouring the fourth seed. Sizeable crowd gathered to witness this encounter.
The match started off slowly and both players met blow to blow to push the score forward. There were two critical situations where Spanish had opportunities to break his opponent serve but he couldn’t exploit those golden chances
and without any break score was pushed to 6-6.
Tie-breaker was enforced; in the meantime Argentine had struck two aces compared to just one of his opponent; both players had committed a single double-fault in the midst of the set as well. It was matter of keeping your concentration
levels high and not allowing your opponent any easy point.
Unfortunately the match favourite couldn’t handle the pressure and committed another double-fault that led to his downfall. The initial advantage was nicely exploited by the Spanish who pocketed the first set with 40 points to
his name.
Trailing one set down, Mayer came back strong to make an impact. Second set was similar to the first set as both players went neck to neck throughout the set. They started off in traditional fashion buy holding on to their serves
and pushed the score to 3-3.
La Nava provided the first breakthrough by breaking his opponent’s serve and taking the lead by Argentine broke back to bring the score to level at 4-4. Both rivals held their next game on their respective serves.
The second breakthrough came when Argentine broke his opponent’s serve and held his serve to take the second set and enforce the third set. Match was perfectly poised at that stage and both players were eager to steal the third
set win to place a berth into the next round draws.
Initial outbreak in the first four games of the set by the Argentine left his opponent in hysteria; he held his serves and broke twice in succession to take 4-0 lead upfront. It was majestic to say the least as he struck two outrageous
aces and hammered Nava on his own serves. The next four games were wrapped up on respective serves.
Leonardo Mayer now plays the wildcard entrant Guilherme Clézar in the next round.
Tags: