Petra Martic denies Kurumi Nara off the quarter-final spot – Malaysian Open 2012
World number 66, Petra Martic, escaped an upset against the 20-years-old Japanese contestant, Kurumi Nara, in the second round of the BMW Malaysian Open tournament on Wednesday. It was a taxing battle of four hours and 23 minutes;
although it was interrupted in the middle due to rain, it ended up 6-2, 3-6, 6-0 in favour of the Croatian.
Nara was unlucky at the start; her shots were missing the sweet spot of the racquet and usually ended up hitting the top of the net and bouncing back to her own court. She lost the opening serve game and to her distress lost another
in the fifth game onwards. She was trailing 1-5 by the end of the sixth game and couldn’t find any break back to diminish the trail.
The second set was completely hijacked by the Japanese who started off well with a serve hold. An exchange of breakpoints at both ends took the scores 3-3 before the Japanese registered a hold to take a lead of 4-3.
Martic was under pressure to hold her serve but she failed to do so and gifted an opportunity to her opponent to step ahead and level the set scores. Nara registered a successful serve hold to enforce the third set into play.
Unfortunately for the Japanese, the rain interrupted the play to lose the momentum she had built over the course of second set. She couldn’t explore her sublime form again and faced a bagel. Three back-to-back breakpoints for the
Croatian fifth seed earned her the second round spot in the tournament.
She will take on the winner of the clash between the Czech talented starlet, Kristyna Pliskova, and the third seed Chinese contestant, Shuai Peng.
Other winner of the day was Su-Wei Hsieh who defeated the Aussie player, Casey Dellacqua, in straight sets. The top seed Pole, Agnieszka Radwanska, is scheduled to play take on the Uzbek tennis professional, Akgul Amanmuradova,
in the first round battle. The defending champion from Australia, Jelena Dokic, ousted the French participant Kristina Mladenovic in the opening round to begin her title defence on Tuesday.
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