2014 Wimbledon<\/a> on Wednesday.<\/strong><\/p>\nIt was Novak’s 40th match win at The Championships and his 11th victory in 12 meetings against the Czech.<\/p>\n
Novak saved two break points in the ninth game of the opening set. He converted his third break\/set point in the next game for 6-4.<\/p>\n
A break in the sixth game of the second set was enough for Nole to take it 6-3.<\/p>\n
The third set went into a tie-breaker. Stepanek looked down at 2-5, but stormed back to win it 7-5.<\/p>\n
The similar scenario was seen in the fourth set. It was decided in a tie-breaker. This time Djokovic sealed the match at 7-5.<\/p>\n
“I was two sets up and had break point chances and I should have closed it out in the third-set tie-break,”<\/strong> Novak said. “But credit to him for fighting. He performs really well on the big stage, loves to engage the crowd and is a great entertainer. It was a difficult one but I am glad I managed to hang in there mentally to win.”<\/strong>
\n
\nMatch statistics<\/span>: aces (18-9), double faults (2-2), winners (54-51), unforced errors (24-27), total points won (153-135).<\/p>\nNovak takes a 6-1 H2H record into his third round match against world no.44 Gilles Simon on Friday.<\/strong><\/p>\nThe Frenchman beat Robin Haase in straights sets earlier in the day.<\/p>\n
Photo: Getty Images<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"No.1 seed spent 3 hours and 17 minutes in seeing off world no.38 Radek Stepanek 6-4, 6-3, 6-7 (5), 7-6 (5) in their second round encounter on Wednesday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":59565,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[101010469,101012193,113,101011449,101012463],"class_list":["post-59570","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tennis","tag-grand-slam-en-2","tag-london-en","tag-second-round","tag-the-championships-en","tag-wimbledon-2014-en"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/novakdjokovic.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59570","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/novakdjokovic.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/novakdjokovic.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novakdjokovic.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novakdjokovic.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59570"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/novakdjokovic.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59570\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59594,"href":"https:\/\/novakdjokovic.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59570\/revisions\/59594"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novakdjokovic.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/59565"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/novakdjokovic.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novakdjokovic.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novakdjokovic.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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