Potito Starace advances past Julian Reister into 2nd round – SkiStar Swedish Open 2011
Potito Starace, seeded eighth in the tournament, skilfully carved his way into the second round of the SkiStar Swedish Open 2011 with a straight sets win against the German Julian Reister on Tuesday. Starace, an Italian was the
only representative from the seeded players in the day’s schedule. Starace came through the fiercely contested first set by winning the tie-break and completely overpowered Reister to win the second set squarely.
Starace has been in the limelight during most of the recent months, his instrumental role in helping Italy defeat Slovenia and end a four match-losing streak bolstered his infallible record at the Davis Cup. As of now he has 14
wins in the singles out of his 15 matches at the Davis Cup. Both Reister and Starace have performed at their best on clay courts like the one at Bastad. Reister is now ranked outside the top 150 and has been picking a number of challenger titles frequently
but has yet to garner any main event title.
Reister’s two aces and adroitness at serving helped him level the first set and the game went into tie-break. Reister was able to clinch 17 of his 24 first serve points, an efficiency of 71%. Both Starace and Reister registered
one serve break each. Starace had excellent serve accuracy at around 85% and was able to round 23 points off his 34 serves. Hence the longer of the two sets in the match ended with Starace winning the tie break. The scores at the end were 7-6 (8-6) in his
favour.
The second set began with the scores initially levelled relatively quickly at 1-1. But Starace effectively won a break point and broke his opponent’s back to barge ahead in the rest of the set. Reister’s three aces in the set were
in effect countered by the three double faults that he committed. Starace’s performance was one fitting a player ranked considerably higher that his current 51st rank. Starace accumulated two serve breaks in this second set and won 6-3.
Starace gathered 46 service points, 23 return points for a total of 69 points. While Reister managed 38 service points and 21 returns points, totaling to 59 points. The match continued for one hour and twenty seven minutes.
Next up in the tournament for Starace is the French qualifier Jonathan Dasnieres de Veigy. De Veigy made his way to the second round by edging past the Swedish wild card contestant Andreas Vinciguerra.
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