Gicquel Falls in Three

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Andy is through to the third round of the Australian open after another efficient straight sets win, this time over Frenchman Marc Gicquel, 6-1 6-4 6-3.

He’ll next face Florent Serra who came through in five sets against Jarkko Nieminen.

“It was a good performance,” Andy told the BBC after the match.

“The conditions were quite tricky. It got quite windy and I had to come through a couple of tough games. So I thought it was solid. It was a great atmosphere. It felt a bit like Davis Cup, there was a lot of noise, a lot of people up and moving around.”

So, another convincing performance from Andy who got himself ahead early in each set, and never looked back.

There were plenty of positives to take from the match, not least a first serve percentage in the 50 per cent zone as opposed to the 30’s. .

Most impressive perhaps was the manner in which Andy clipped the wings of an opponent who is never afraid to take the ball on.

There were more of the surgical forays to net that characterised his first round match, real venom on the groundstrokes (the backhand line a big weapon at times), and all allied with the low error count that is the bedrock of Andy’s game.

The net result was that it took Gicquel 20 minutes to get on the board in a first set which Andy wrapped up just four minutes later.

Andy kept the pressure up with a break in Gicquel’s opening service game of the second set, but the Frenchman did well to hold for 2-1 as a whitewash threatened.

He had triple break-point for 3-all soon after, but Andy found the big serves to hold out and would take the set 6-4.

He set himself up nicely with another early break in the third, and although the Frenchman broke back for the first and only time in the match two games later, Andy’s aggressive brand of tennis would fashion two further breaks and wrap up the match inside two hours.

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