GASQUET FALLS

Richard Gasquet’s campaign in the BNP Paribas Open has come to an end. He suffered a comprehensive defeat against Fernando Verdasco in the round of 16 yesterday. The score line of the match was 6-7(5), 1-6 against the Frenchman.

Gasquet didn’t play as badly as the above numbers suggest though. He was very competitive in the opening set which he eventually lost in the tie breaker and then, in the following set, his game fell apart a little bit.

He just didn’t seem to be there 100% mentally in the second set. He looked exhausted and ended up playing lose shots to just gift his opponent the points.

It was the 15^th time that these two players were going head to head against each other. Out of the last 14 encounters, both had won 7 each. So, this win gave Verdasco a lead of 8-7.

It’s not that Gasquet didn’t get opportunities during the match. He actually got plenty of them, but, he managed to capitalize on just a few and thus, deservedly ended up on the losing side.

The no. of break points that Gasquet got in total was 8 and he missed out every time.

Verdasco on the other hand pounced on a couple of break points and that helped him in winning the second set by such a big margin.

The match went on for about one and half hours, 95 minutes to be precise.

Now, in the quarter final round, Verdasco will be locking horns with the local boy John Isner who is in very good form at the moment. He banged in 13 aces in his last match against the Taiwanese player Yen-Hsun Lu and beat him with complete dominance in just more than one hour.