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  • Söderling and Simon Roll into Rotterdam Semifinals

    2/23/08 7:35 AM | Ricky Dimon
    - Robin Söderling and Gilles Simon score impressive straight-set victories in the quarterfinals of the ABN AMRO World Tennis Tournament to set up a Saturday night semifinal clash.

    Although this week’s event in Rotterdam featured eight unseeded quarterfinals and therefore four matchups that would be expected to be relatively even, not one went into three sets. Two of the straight-set winners on Friday were Robin Söderling and Gilles Simon, who will do battle in one of the two semifinal showdowns at the ABN AMRO World Tennis Tournament.

    Söderling routed Andres Seppi, who was coming in with the momentum of a huge second-round upset over top-seeded Nadal, in decisive 6-3, 6-2 fashion. It was never close. The Swede broke once in the first set and twice in the second and never lost serve, facing just one break point throughout the match. In fact Söderling lost just 12 points in nine service games, including just three in a dominant second set.

    Söderling now boasts an incredible 54-23 match record indoors compared with an inferior 72-75 record in outdoor settings.

    He will take his stellar indoor clip into Saturday’s semifinal against Simon. The Frenchman won by the exact same score as Söderling: 6-3, 6-2 over qualifier Teimuraz Gabashvili. While the Russian pulled off huge wins out of nowhere in the first two rounds over Juan Carlos Ferrero and Nicolas Mahut, he could not sustain the same level of play against Simon. Instead, Gabashvili slipped back into the form that had him toiling on the Challenger circuit throughout the second half of 2007 and the beginning of this year. Simon took advantage, especially when facing break points on his serve and when getting looks at his opponent’s second serve. He saved all eight break points and won a whopping 16 of 25 points (64 percents) when Gabashvili had to deliver a second offering.

    It will be the third head-to-head meeting between Söderling and Simon. The first two both came early in 2007, with Söderling taking the first encounter on the carpet of Zagreb before Simon got revenge two weeks later on the hard courts of Marseille.

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