Samantha Stosur sails past Ekaterina Makarova in round one – Dubai Duty Free Championships 2013
World number nine, Samantha Stosur, didn’t break a sweat against the 19th ranked Russian star, Ekaterina Makarova, in the opening round of the Dubai Duty Free Championships on Tuesday. She clutched the victory in straight
sets 6-3, 6-1 and book a spot in the second round of the event in Dubai.
It was the third head-to-head triumph for the 28-year-old Aussie against Makarova who has just registered one victory against her in the entire career. So the odds were tilting in favour of the Aussie tennis ace and she proved
her worth by dispatching the 24-year-old Russian easily. The seventh seed Stosur will lock horns against the Taiwanese professional, Su-Wei Hsieh, in the hunt for a spot in the quarter-finals of the tournament.
The opening set was truly balanced until the first six games. Both athletes met blow-by-blow; traded breakpoints in the fifth and sixth game that kept the scores level. Stosur registered a serve hold to love at the most crucial
stage of the game and the scoreboard pressure took a toll on her opponent who dropped a breakpoint. The opportunity was gifted to Stosur to serve for the set and she did that with no mistake at all.
The start to the second set was pretty ordinary for the Russian who lost the opening serve game and couldn’t test her opponent except the one game when she had an opportunity to bring the scores at level terms but she failed to
do so.
After a tight serve hold, Stosur went on to break her rival’s serve in the fifth game and captured a resounding lead of 4-1 which was soon converted to 5-1 courtesy another comfortable serve hold. Makarova was under a lot of pressure
and wasn’t even trying to fight back from that stage. She was just handing over the points to her rival in the seventh game that ended the second set in quick succession.
Stosur won the match with an ace and 67 points to her name. She converted 63 percent of her first serve in and won 69 percent points on them. However, the critical factor that led to her victory was the breakpoints conversion rate
which was 56 percent compared to 13 percent of her rival.
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