Wawrinka into his 6th straight Slam quarterfinal - UBITENNIS

Wawrinka into his 6th straight Slam quarterfinal

By Lorenzo Dicandia
4 Min Read

Stan the Man defeats Donald Young 64 16 63 64, advancing to the quarterfinals.

Four years ago in the second round of the same tournament Donald Young and Stan Wawrinka produced a high quality match won only in the tiebreak of the fifth set by the American, who had been down two sets to one. At the time Stan the Man had been nothing more than a solid top twenty player, and no one really believed he could become the multiple Slam winner he became only three years after, and there was actually nothing that could foresee such a big breakthrough. He had only been in two Slam quarterfinals in his career and had won three titles, all of them ATP 250, on nine finals played, aged already 26.
On the other hand, Donald Young had been a disappointment to all the American fans who believed that they had found their new champion. Young had, indeed, been the no.1 junior player in the world for quite a while, winning both the Australian Open and the Wimbledon junior titles. However, he wasn’t able to maintain the same star-status he had as a junior in his transition into the main tour.
That match had therefore suddenly reinvigorated the hopes of the Americans to have found a player to believe in and had confirmed all the perplexities critics had on Wawrinka’s mentality and continuity. Now, after four years, things have evolved enormously but not in the way everyone expected.
Wawrinka came into this fourth round match as the fifth seed and as the reigning Roland Garros champion; Donald young, instead, has never really made the breakthrough he was hoping to make and he now is ranked 68 in the world. Nonetheless, his path to the fourth round has definitely been an exciting one: he first defeated No. 11 seed Gilles Simon after trailing two sets and 3-0 down, and then went on to defeat Bedene and the 22nd seeded player Troicki, after being again two sets down.
The pivotal moment of the first set came already in the third game when Wawrinka broke his opponent to love, managing to then hold the lead until the end of it. In the first set the Swiss won 93% of points played on his first serve, offering only one break point to Young. In the second set, however, things changed dramatically with Wawrinka dropping his level and losing his serve twice, while committing 14 unforced errors to only six winners. This was the first set lost by Wawrinka during the tournament. Young didn’t really have to do much as Stan simply disappeared from the court. Anyway, the American wasn’t able to hold momentum going down 5-0 in the third set and eventually losing it six games to three.
Wawrinka continued to dominate the play in the fourth set, often showing why his backhand is considered one of the best, if not the best one, in the game. He went immediately up a break in the fourth set and maintained the lead till the very end, winning the set 6-4 and producing a grand total of 52 winners in the whole match.
At the age of 30, Wawrinka has reached the quarterfinals of all the Slams in the same season for his first time ever, confirming the recent tendency that sees male tennis players giving their best at a later stage in their careers. He will now face the winner of the match Anderson-Murray.

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