Stan Wawrinka earns career-best 52nd win; advances to Paris quarter-finals
No. 4 seed Stan Wawrinka improved to 4-0 against unseeded Viktor Troicki on Thursday, advancing to the BNP Paribas Masters quarter-finals with a 6-4, 7-5 victory.
It marked a career-best 52nd win (52-15) for the Swiss in 2015, a year in which he captured the second Grand Slam title of his career at Roland Garros. The 27th-ranked Troicki fell to 35-28 on the year.
The foes exchanged breaks in the fourth and seventh games of the opening set, but with Troicki serving at 4-5, he was broken at love, a blistering down-the-line one-handed backhand from Wawrinka sealing the set.
Wawrinka and Troicki would again swap breaks in the fifth and eighth games of the second set, leveling the match at four-all. But Troicki, into the third round in Paris for the first time since 2011, would falter with the match on the line. Serving for survival at 5-6, 15-40, he would surrender his fourth break of the evening to fall in one hour and 19 minutes.
Wawrinka now awaits the winner of the Round-of-16 match-up between Spaniard Rafael Nadal and South African Kevin Anderson.
In a battle of former BNP Paribas Masters champions, No. 5 seed Tomas Berdych rolled into the quarter-finals with a 6-3, 6-4 win over ninth-seeded Jo-Wilfried Tsonga at the AccorHotels Arena.
Berdych, the 2005 titlist, won 86 per cent of his first-serve points (26 of 30) in the one-hour and 21-minute contest, improving to 8-3 against his French foe. The Czech will face World No. 1 Novak Djokovic in the quarter-finals on Friday.
“He’s a complete player,” said Tsonga, the last French player to win the BNP Paribas Masters title (2008). “He hits hard from both sides. His shots are very heavy. When you are not able to overrun him, then it becomes complicated. He is dictating the points and stepping forward into the court, and this is his strength. He’s a very powerful player. Very often he stops me from playing my own game, which is a similar game to his.”
( Courtesy of the ATP and Original Link – http://www.atpworldtour.com/en/news/stan-and-deliver-wawrinka-a-winner )
Topics: Atp World Tour, Bercy tennis, BNP Paris Indoors, Jo Wilfried Tsonga, Kevin Anderson, Rafa Nadal, Stan Wawrinka, Tennis, Tennis News, Tomas Berdych, Viktor Troicki
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