Rafael Nadal withstood fellow Spaniard Juan Carlos Ferrero’s early fightback to reach the Monte Carlo Masters last eight with a 6-4, 6-1 win yesterday.
Three times champion Nadal, who is defending his title, will next face another compatriot in fifth seed David Ferrer, who swept aside Serb Janko Tipsarevic 6-4, 6-0 in the third round.
Ferrer has been eliminated in the quarter-finals on his last four appearances in the principality.
Nadal and Ferrero, with four French Open titles and five Monte Carlo crowns between them, treated the fans to top-notch tennis in the first set before the 13th seed ran out of steam.
No. 2 seed Nadal built a 4-1 lead in the first set after an early break only for Ferrero to level at 4-4 with a super forehand winner on his opponent’s serve.
Ferrero, who won the French Open two years before Nadal started his reign on the Roland Garros clay, found some success by changing his tactics, winning 13 points at the net.
However, Nadal took the set after 54 minutes on his fourth chance by winning an impressive rally that saw Ferrero retrieve the ball between his legs with his back to the net. Nadal now had his grip on the match and jumped to a 2-0 lead when he won a 15 minute-long second game on his fifth break point with a service return winner.
Ferrero, who was victorious at the Monte Carlo event in 2002 and 2003, managed to pull a break back but by then the Mallorcan had raced to a 4-0 advantage which had almost put the result beyond doubt.
Nadal sealed the win after one hour and 46 minutes with a backhand winner.
Following two early exchanges of breaks, Ferrer broke decisively in the 10th game to take the first set and never looked back, wrapping it up in 67 minutes.
On Wednesday Nadal overpowerered Croatia’s Mario Ancic to earn a comfortbale 6-0, 6-3 win over the Croatian in 75 minutes.
The muscular Spaniard won the first eight games before dropping serve but took the last three games for a routine victory.
Nadal, who has set the benchmark for claycourt excellence, admitted it was virtually impossible for him to maintain his stranglehold on the surface.
His record on the sport’s slowest and most demanding surface leaves opponents both intimidated and mystified as to how to counter his armoury.
He’s won 108 of his last 111 matches on clay and has never been beaten at Roland Garros winning a perfect 21 matches.
In Monte Carlo, he has won 20 times in 21 appearances and his last three titles in the principality have proved the springboard for the dominance which has followed.
He almost added last year’s Hamburg Masters to his CV before falling to Roger Federer in the final, a defeat which brought to an end an 81-match winning streak on clay.
But he’s not counting on sweeping all before him once again on the European claycourt swing.
“To repeat every year, to win every title, it’s going to be impossible,” said Nadal who is looking for his first trophy since winning on clay in Stuttgart last July.
“I arrived here trying to do my best. If my best is quarter-finals, semi-finals, the final, champion, I don’t know,” he said.
“It’s going to be a very tough clay season. But to repeat everything, it’s almost impossible,” Nadal said.
He is wary of over-confidence knowing that the ever-present danger of Roger Federer is now supplemented by Serbia’s Novak Djokovic, the world’s best player this year and the winner of the Australian Open in January.
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