Tsonga serves it up

Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, the tournament's tenth seed, and the player I have fearlessly and possibly stupidly selected to defeat both Federer and Murray en route to a semi final with Nadal, had the follow up match to Caro on Hisense Arena.

He had won the Hopman Cup with Alize Cornet, and played a match on Rod Laver Arena to commemorate Roger Federer - it must be the Fed's Diamond Jubilee or something he has been feted as much if not more than the Queen this past month.

His company today on court was somewhat less exalted, but in a part of Italy Filippo Volandri is loved.  The 70th ranked player was as high as 25 in the world so theoretically his brand of tennis could stretch Tsonga but realistically not very far.

He needed to make a lot of excursions to the net and make them count to have an impact on the powerful groundstrokes of the French former Aus Open finalist.  The heat today would make running back and forth to the net a rather thankless task especially with the likelihood of being passed frequently by Tsonga.

However for the first two games the two traded quality stuff, and Volandri appeared comfortable in this company.
Surprisingly the initial break came from Volandri's racquet work when he converted a break point in the third game with a sizzling backhand pass.  Holding serve convincingly the Italian led 3-1 and murmurs of "we have a match" while not being heard could possibly be envisaged should this continue.
It didn't, and Jo-Wilfried restored a sense of order to the day by holding serve and then cashing in on some silly errors from Volandri.

3-3 became 6-5 to Tsonga as The French serve settled into a rhythm which Volandri could not contain. The famous Tsonga forehand was to the fore as well,  it Filippo had some volleys of his own to donate to the table, and the tennis was good to watch.  Unfortunately, it was a series of mistakes from Volandri that gifted the set to Tsonga in the finish 7-5

Tsonga continued in his push for impregnability on serve at the start of set 2, which perturbed Volandri no end. It became more difficult for the lower ranked player to hold his serve, because without the obvious weapons of Tsonga, he had to work that much harder, and the toil began to show.
On the scoreboard it took until the sixth game to be reflected due to Jo-Wilfried's incompetence on return of service.  In the sixth game Tsonga rushed the net and caught his prey off guard - the rest of the game was mostly errors from Volandri all contributing to the break of serve required by the tenth seed.

Serves were held until the end of the set which was won by Tsonga 6-3 to lead by the two sets 7-5 6-3.

The third set saw Tsonga with chances to break early but these were wasted.  The fifth game was the back breaker - errors flowed from the racquet of Volandri and at the end of the carnage Tsonga led 4-2

This became 5-2 on the back of another strong Tsonga service game and the final game was the eight game of the set.

The tenth seed won an 'at times' close encounter - his serve was solid, but his ground strokes need some further encouragement.