Seeded players sail smoothly

Seeded players sail smoothly

New Delhi, October 9: All seeded players with the exception of three in Girls U-18, sailed into the second round of DSCL Open National tennis championship here on Monday.

In the men's section, Vishal Uppal, Sandeep Kirtane, Nitin Kirtane and Sunil Kumar, had easy first round matches.

Third seed Vishal gave a 6-1, 6-4 drubbing to former Davis Cup player Asif Ismail in a match that lasted just over an hour. Ismail looked very uneasy against fast and accurate service of his opponent throughtout the match.

Another Davis Cupper Sandeep Kirtane, seeded-fourth here, hardly raised any sweat in his 6-0, 6-0 white-wash in 50 minutes of lucky loser Uday Kumar Reddy.

Sandeep's brother and fifth-seed Nitin cruised to a comfortable 6-2, 6-3 victory over Anand Radhakrishna. The match lasted one hour 20 minutes.

In the women's section, Aarthi Venkatraman and Rushmi Chakravorthi moved into the second round with easy victories.

Seeded second, Rushmi drubbed Isha Chopra 4-0, 4-0, 4-1 in 45 minutes, while fifth-seed Aarthi defeated Jasleen Randhawa 4-2, 4-0, 4-1 in a match lasting one hour and 10 minutes.

The women's game (seniors) is being used as a `guineapig' for an `Alternative Scoring System' experiment. The women will play best-of-five sets match where a set goes into a tie-breaker if the players are tied at four games each.

The organisers of the tournament said the new scoring format has been ``designed to increase the number of exciting moments and points during a match''.

In the longest singles match of the day, Vijendra Laad took two and a half hours to beat Manoj Mahadevan 4-6, 6-3, 6-2.

The Girls under-18 category saw nearly half the seeds felling by the wayside as third-seed Liza Pereira, fourth-seed Nandita Chandrasekhar and fifth-seed Sania Mirza crashed out in the first round.

Liza was beaten by Nandini Perumal 5-7, 6-4, 2-6 in a keenly fought match.

Sania lost to Megha Vakharia, who was given a wild card entry, in straight sets but not before putting up a fight. She lost the first set tamely but came back strongly to force a tie-break in the second. The score read 6-1, 7-6 (8-6) in favour of Megha.

Rest of the seeds in the category prevailed over their opponents without facing much trouble.

Boys u-18 category saw the top six seeds, who played their first round matches, cruise into the next round without much difficulty with the exception of third seed Ravikrishna Palivela who was stretched to three sets before prevailing 6-4, 3-6, 6-2.

Second seed Parantap Chaturvedi was also tested by the wild card entrant Nipun Gupta by forcing a tie-break in the first set which Chaturvedi took at 9-7.

Chaturvedi wrapped the next set quickly with the score 7-5 (9-7), 6-1 in his favour.