Soderling marches on

12 April 2012

Robin Soderling continued his stunning run at the French Open with a straight-sets victory over 10th seed Nikolay Davydenko in the quarter-finals.

The 24-year-old Swede recorded arguably the biggest upset in the tournament's history on Sunday by knocking out world number one and four-time defending champion Rafael Nadal.

And he was in equally imperious form again on Tuesday to see off Davydenko 6-1 6-3 6-1 on Suzanne Lenglen court and claim his place in the semi-finals, where he will face either Andy Murray or Fernando Gonzalez.

While some people expected his level to dip, he clearly had other ideas and produced another masterclass of mighty groundstrokes to triumph in just an hour and 41 minutes.

The world number 25 raced through the first set, breaking his Russian opponent twice to wrap it up 6-1 in just 23 minutes.

The second set was a much tighter affair, with the first six games going with serve.

But Soderling, who headed into the contest buoyed by having beaten Davydenko in three of their five previous meetings - including both times on clay, then took control.

He broke the world number 11 in game seven, survived a double-fault in a hard-fought game to consolidate at 5-3 and then rounded off the set with a second break.

Davydenko also enjoyed an impressive victory on Sunday, seeing off eighth seed Fernando Verdasco 6-2 6-2 6-4, but the shellshocked Russian was thoroughly outplayed by Soderling in the third set.

He managed only one further game in the match - his first service game - as Soderling clinched an impressive victory.

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in