Yes, this is the Davis Cup. The shirt weighs and emotions prevail. Everything is subject to provisionality. Pablo Carreño notes that he saw the open sky and ended up buried by the tenacity of Guido Pella, more whole, stronger, more competitive in a very hard game that places Argentina with an advantage in the quarterfinals of the Davis Cup Finals. The tennis player from Bahía Blanca won 6-7 (3), 7-6 (4) and 6-1, after two hours and 38 minutes. With a single victory in his five participations in the Mutua Madrid Open, Carreño was close to the possibility of living his great night in the Magic Box, but he sank in the third quarter, he did not support the demand for a duel of these characteristics, so different to those of the circuit.

Until there, it was a tight confrontation, which he painted better for the Spanish in quite a few moments, such as when he had a ball to get 4-2 and serve in the second set. Even without taking advantage of it, it showed replication capacity. Pella goes bankrupt in the ninth of the second set and takes off to match the game, but gets tangled up and lets go three points to take the partial, two of them with setbacks beyond the baseline. Carreño takes advantage of the second option and equals five, after a game of more than ten minutes. Adjust next and the tiebreaker is secured. Unlike the first set, Pella is accurate and makes it his own.

Good start of Spanish

Sustained by a good service with which he won his first two serve shifts in white, Carreño took control of the initial set and could have precipitated his outcome in the case of taking advantage of the option presented to him in the ninth game, after achieving the break in the eighth. A setback to the net ended up condemning him to the tiebreaker, where he neutralized an initial disadvantage to return to the tennis with which he had successfully walked. Pella tried to shorten the points, opening angles with the drive and going to the net if the opportunity presented itself. I knew that in the exchanges I had the ones to lose. He could not stand the frantic pace of rally that Carreño imposed on him, handing out hard from the right and the other way around. He needed to hurry the Argentine, whose first point to the rest came with a winning parallel setback on his opponent's second serve. He had a difficult time taking the initiative in front of an opponent charged with conviction, who did not weigh the wasted set ball to go around the tie break .

The temperature is mild in the stands, with a reduced but jaranera colony in Argentina, which competed in acoustic fervor with local fans. On the bench, three titles of Roland Garros: the two of Sergi Bruguera, Spanish captain, and the one of Gastón Gaudio, responsible for the albiceleste. Carreño, defeated by Benoit Paire in the semifinals of 2017, against France, in Lille, shrugged to redeem himself and assert himself as a relief from Roberto Bautista, absent for the death of his father on Thursday night.

Carreño had defeated Pella in his two previous crossings: in 2017, in Vienna, and last summer, in the first round of the United States Open. The Bahia Blanca player is a good competitor. Without definitive blows, with the basics of clay he knows how to adapt to any surface, as he showed reaching the quarterfinals of the last Wimbledon. He is, together with Leonardo Mayer, a survivor from Argentina who won the Davis Cup in 2016, with Juan Martín del Potro at the helm. He had played ten singles in the Davis Cup, with five wins. Champion this year in Sao Paulo, he enjoyed his best ranking at the end of August, climbing to the top 20 .

With the skin of a survivor, Pella takes the loot in the fourth game of the third set, where his rival lets out a 40-0 and is at a disadvantage that will prove insurmountable. Carreño does not get up, or under the stimuli of the fans, who go out with him, waiting for Nadal to put things in order before Schwartzman and a doubles match where the semifinalist team will be decided.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Know more

  • Davis cup
  • tennis

Spain - RussiaSpain - Russia: Timetable and where to watch the Davis Cup 2019 on TV today

DavisRublev Cup and Khachanov end Croatia and warn Spain

DavisFarruko Cup, 'food trucks' and the best tennis players in the world: a day in the Davis Cup