Raven Klaasen eases past Inigo Cervantes-Huegun into the final – Wuhai Challenger 2011
Continuing with his good form, the South African Raven Klaasen lambasted Spaniard Inigo Cervantes-Huegun in their semi final match at the ATP China International Challenger 2011. Klaasen closed the one hour and twenty three minutes
match 6-3, 7-6(6) to effectively win the match and reserve a berth in the finals of the prestigious ATP Challengers Tournament.
The 28 year old Klaasen maintains a current win-loss standing of 0-1 and hasn’t been hugely active on the ATP Tour circuit. He, however, has been playing frequently at the various Challenger tournaments this season, managing to
reach the quarter finals of many amongst them. He won the Uzbekistan Challenger in May against Mikhail Vasiliev and this is the South African’s second final of the season. Klaasen opened his Wuhai campaign in prolific style by first defeating Chinese wild
card Yang Lu and then managing to pull off an upset win against seventh seed Michael Ryderstedt.
Huegun’s performance has been on a downhill slide since the beginning of this season, with his current standing having fallen to No. 496 from his career high of 209 in October 2009. He has almost solely limited himself to the Challenger
circuit this year, perhaps to build up his strength and confidence. He has managed to reach the quarter finals of almost all the tournaments he’s played so far and the Spaniard clocked in his best performance for the season at the Netherlands F2 challenger
where he won the title against Maxime Authom.
The first set easily went to Klaasen who performed superbly and managed to successfully convert a breakpoint early on in the game, to leave his opponent trailing. Klaasen served beautifully at 65% and won 14 of the 20 first serve
points. Huegun meanwhile failed to put any pressure on the South African since he could not set up even a single serve break situation to terrorise Klaasen. The ser closed 6-3 in Klaasen’s account.
Huegun’s skill, which brought him till the semi finals resurfaced if only for a short while in the second set. The players fought ferociously, registering two serve breaks each and the closely contested set had to be decided by
a tie break. Klaasen regained composure to limit his opponent to 6 points against his 8.
Klaasen’s final stage is set against top seed Go Soeda of Japan. The Japanese had outclassed his opponent Yong-Kyu Lim without breaking a sweat in a two set victory in their semi finals’ match on Saturday.
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