Daniil Glinka makes Cassis Open final after straight set victory
Estonian tennis player Daniil Glinka has made the final of the Cassis Open in France, his furthest progress in a Challenger 75 level tournament in his career to date.
He did so by beating Jurij Rodionov (Austria) convincingly in straight sets, 6:2, 6:4.
The Cassis Open is a Challenger 75-level competition.
Glinka, ranked 347th in the world, had beaten Arthur Fery (U.K.) in the tournament quarter finals, played near Marseille, in a closely fought three-set match.
This set him up with a meeting with tournament fourth seed Rodionov, who once ranked as highly as 87th in the world and at 154th nowadays is still nearly 200 spots ahead of Glinka in the ATP table.
In set on Glinka won four games in a row to race to a 6:2 victory.
In the second set, the Estonian had his serve broken in game one but immediately returned the favor in the next game. The pair exchanged game wins after that until things were at 5:4, when the Estonian broke a second time, and on his second match point, took a 6:4 set win and with it the match..
The entire encounter lasted one hour and 23 minutes. Glinka served six aces and committed three double faults, while his opponent served one ace. Glinka converted 58 percent of his first service points to Rodionov's 51 percent, while the difference on the second serve was much wider at 70 percent from Glinka compared with 53 percent for Rodionov 53 percent. The Estonian converted four out of the six break points presented to him.
The final takes place Sunday afternoon,´ and Glinka will meet either Briton Billy Harris (ATP 151) or German Justin Engel (ATP 220), The latter beat Estonia's top player Mark Lajal in the quarter finals.
Glinka has already risen to 304th position in the ATP live world rankings off the back of his performance in Cassis.
Editor's note: This piece was updated to include Glinka's semi-final win.
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Editor: Andrew Whyte, Kristjan Kallaste, Henrik Laever
