Federer falls to Nalbandian again
Roger Federer fell to David Nalbandian
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Thursday, 01, Nov 2007 10:19
Argentinean David Nalbandian dumped Roger Federer out of the Paris Masters this evening after beating the world number one for the second time in the space of two weeks.
Nalbandian beat Federer 11 days ago to win the Madrid Masters and overwhelmed the Swiss star again with a 6-4 7-6 win.
Very few players give Federer as many problems as Nalbandian does and he made his intentions clear early in this match by breaking the Swiss in only the third game of the first set.
Nalbandian broke his opponent's serve again to surge into a 5-2 lead, but he was unable to serve out for the set as Federer used all his experience to save five set-points to bring the first set back to 5-4.
Nevertheless Nalbandian managed to keep his nerve at the second time of asking and served out to go 1-0 up.
The tennis in the first set was excellent, but both players seem to go up another gear in the second and a noisy Paris crowd witnessed some breathtaking shots. But it was Nalbandian who was the stronger of the two players and his groundstrokes had more impetus.
With the second set nicely poised at 4-4, the 25-year-old Argentinean unloaded a number of ferocious groundstrokes to go up 0-40 on the Federer serve.
And although Federer came back to 30-40, Nalbandian broke to take a 5-4 lead.
But again Federer came back in style with two fabulous backhands to break Nalbandian. The second set went into a tiebreak but it was all one-way traffic in favour of the Argentinean.
Federer hit a number of uncharacteristically loose shots to lose the tie-break 7-3.
Nalbandian will face Spaniard David Ferrer in the quarter-finals and his latest win over Federer sees him with an enviable 8-8 record against the Swiss maestro.