Coria scrapes into second round in Rome

Ninth seed Guillermo Coria scraped into the second round of the Rome Masters with a 7-6 5-7 6-4 win over Fernando Gonzalez yesterday. The Argentinian had won his previous four meetings against Gonzalez.

That superiority was not evident in a tight first set that Coria edged on the tie-break after Gonzalez put a forehand into the tramlines.

Coria began to exert more pressure in the second set, but failed to convert any of his eight break points.

He paid the price in the eleventh game when, serving to take the set into another tie break, a double fault gave Gonzalez a break point of his own, which he converted by rifling a service return down the line to take the match into a decider.

The contest could have gone either way, but a pair of unforced errors by Gonzalez in the seventh game allowed Coria to grab the crucial break and then serve out to set up a clash with Germany's Nicolas Kiefer, who beat his compatriot Tommy Haas 6-3 6-1 in an earlier match.

Other results: Martin bt Schuettler 6-0 1-0 (retired); Chela bt Llodra 6-4 6-4; Santoro bt Nalbandian 6-4 1-6 6-4; Safin bt Novak 6-7 6-1 6-1.

Former world number one Kim Clijsters took just 44 minutes to knock out Ukraine's Yuliana Fedak at Berlin's Steffi Graf stadium yesterday and reach the second round of the German Open 6-1 6-0. A 17-match winning streak came to an end for Clijsters in Warsaw last week when she lost to Russia's Svetlana Kuznetsova in the semi-finals.