Nadal Cruises Into Barcelona Third Round at BetLM

Nadal Cruises Into Barcelona Third Round

BARCELONA, Spain

Rafael Nadal over­came a sore knee to open his bid for a sev­enth Barcelona Open title with an easy 6–1, 6–2 win over Guillermo Gar­cia Lopez in the sec­ond round Wednesday.

Nadal had a bye in the first round after defeat­ing Novak Djokovic in the Monte Carlo Mas­ters final on Sun­day and improved to 31–1 on the clay in Barcelona after break­ing his fel­low Spaniard six times.

“My knee both­ered me a lit­tle, but that’s nor­mal. In 15 days, the dis­com­fort isn’t going to go away, but it doesn’t keep you from play­ing so it’s not a prob­lem,” said Nadal, who had to with­draw before the semi­fi­nals of last month’s Sony Eric­s­son Open because of a left knee prob­lem. “I made few errors, my back­hand was good and my fore­hand allowed me to vary my game and it helped me a lot.”

Fel­low Spaniard David Fer­rer needed less than an hour to advance to the third round by beat­ing Ser­bian wild card Filip Kra­ji­novic 6–0, 6–3. The sixth-ranked Fer­rer is bid­ding for his first Godo tro­phy after fin­ish­ing as the run­ner up three times.

“Rafa is, with­out a doubt, the favorite because he is the best player of all time on clay, but he can also lose,” Fer­rer said. “Every player has to focus on the rival in front of him now rather than fur­ther ahead.”

Fer­rer plays Albert Mon­tanes in the next round after the Spaniard saved four match points to oust 15th-seeded Bernard Tomic 6–0, 5–7, 7–5.

Canada’s Milos Raonic beat Russia’s Igor Andreev 6–4, 6–1, while Japan’s Kei Nishikori over­came Mikhail Kukushkin 6–3, 4–6, 6–0.

Seventh-seeded Feli­ciano Lopez of Spain also reached the third round with a 6–4, 6–3 vic­tory over Italy’s Flavio Cipolla and will face Jarkko Niem­i­nen of Fin­land, who won 6–3, 6–7 (4), 6–4 over Eduardo Schwank of Argentina.

Kevin Ander­son of South Africa, Albert Ramos of Spain and San­ti­ago Giraldo of Colom­bia also advanced.

BetLM's sports betting news features unique sports betting articles as well as current sports news compiled from leading wire services. This arti­cle was dis­trib­uted by Syn­di­cated Sports news wire and aggre­ga­tion ser­vice, For more ten­nis news see: Nadal cruises into Barcelona third round.

Related Posts:

• Tsonga Into Third Round at China Open
• Nadal Beats Fer­rer for 7th Barcelona Open Win
• Nadal Tops Fer­rer for 7th Barcelona Title
• Nadal, Fer­rer Meet Again in Barcelona
• Nadal, Raonic Advance in Barcelona

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