Madrid (Spain) – After facing a bad phase in the last two months, with just one victory since the semi at the ATP 500 in Dubai, Russian Andrey Rublev seems to be getting back on track. This Sunday, he won his second consecutive Masters 1000 in Madrid, beating the home tennis player Alejandro Davidovich Fokina in a nervous duel, defined in two sets and with scores of 7/6 (12-10) and 6/4.
In the round of 16, seed 8 will face the Dutchman Tallon Griekspoor, who earlier surprised the Danish Holger Rune. It will be the third time that the two face each other and Rublev got the better of the two previous meetings, both last season and decided to turn things around, the first on the hard court in Doha and the other on the grass in Halle, now being the first clash on clay. .
Without winning two games in a row since his controversial disqualification in Dubai, the Russian narrowly missed out on losing the first set tiebreak and trailed behind on the scoreboard. Davidovich opened 5-0, saw the difference drop to 5-4, but still had the first four set-points of the dispute. Rublev didn’t give up and managed to make it 12-10 to make it 1-0 on the scoreboard.
The second half started with a break for each side and then had several more break points for both tennis players, seven in total for Rublev and six for Davidovich. The break that gave the Russian the victory came in a curious move, in which the Spaniard stopped the point asking for the ball to be thrown out, and had his marking challenged by his rival, who showed that the ball had gone out by millimeters.
The two opponents were aggressive and looked for points, Rublev got three more winning balls (16 to 13) and made one more unforced error (10 to 9). The Russian, who clashed with the referee more than once during the match, also served better than Davidovich, finishing with 65% success against 53% for the home tennis player.
