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Stosur leads charge

Stosur leads Aussie charge

05/24/2010 07:48:07 PM

Seventh seed Samantha Stosur led the Australian charge at Roland Garros on Monday night as Carsten Ball and qualifier Sophie Ferguson also advanced to the second round of the French Open.

Stosur was forced to dig deep in the first set against Romanian Simona Halep before eventually prevailing 7-5 6-1.

The Australian looked nervous early as her 18-year-old opponent, the French Open junior champion in 2008, broke serve to go 4-2 up.

But Stosur, who reached the semi-finals in Paris last year, regained her composure to take the set, before racing through the second set to clinch victory in one hour and four minutes.

She will now face Paraguay's Rosanna de los Rios in the next round.

While Stosur's win was expected, Ferguson's clearly was not.

On paper, the world No.142 looked no match for 63rd-ranked Czech Petra Kvitova but Ferguson managed to pull off one her best performances in a 1-6 6-2 6-2 win.

Ball completed a hat-trick of victories for Australia later in the day when he produced a monumental comeback from two sets down to oust Germany's Philipp Petzschner 3-6 6-7 (4-7) 6-2 7-5 9-7 in three hours and 45 minutes.

Ball, ranked 132 in the world, looked down and out after losing the opening two sets against his 39th-ranked opponent but clawed his way back into the contest on the back of some power serving.

"I was down two sets to love and down 15-30 the first game of the third set and then held that," Ball said afterwards.

"I started feeling better with my returns and started to get in some rhythm and played within myself a lot more which gave me momentum."

The news wasn't so good for fellow Aussies Alicia Molik, Jelena Dokic or Peter Luczak, who all bowed out in the first round.

Molik went into her match against fourth seed Jelena Jankovic with a 4-2 head-to-head record but was nowhere near that sort of form as she crashed to a 6-0 6-4 defeat.

Dokic, who is returning to the circuit after two months out with an elbow injury, also failed to put up much of a fight, losing 6-2 6-2 to 24th seed Lucie Safarova in just 59 minutes.

Dokic didn't help her cause by producing 24 unforced errors and six double faults in the encounter.

And Luczak ran into a roadblock in the form of world No.1 Roger Federer, who cruised through with a 6-4 6-1 6-2 win.

Luczak went toe-to-toe with the Swiss master during the opening set, playing his strokes against a Federer who hadn't quite found his rhythm.

The Australian had the opportunity to make it 5-5 in the 10th game after an umpiring call went against Federer, leading to an argument with the chair official.

But Luczak appeared to lose his conversation following this, the Aussie producing an unforced error and a double fault to hand Federer the opening set.

Federer went on to break Luczak at the second opportunity in the second set, going on to steamroll the Australian over the final two sets on his way to a first-up victory.

 
Photograph Copyright : Getty Images

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