CALCUTTA, Nov 9: Fourteen qualifiers made it to the singles main draw of the Futures Tennis Tournament, being held at the South Club courts in Calcutta. They will be joined by three lucky losers and four wild cards. Although only eight qualifiers were supposed to make it to the main draw, the list had to be increased due to a large number of drop-outs.Prahlad Srinath, who had been seeded third here, too pulled-out from the tournament. Patrick Erhardt of Germany is now the third seed with wild card Syed Fazaluddin the fourth seed.
Tomorrow, the main rounds take off with qualifier Rishi Sridhar taking on another qualifier Arun Avinash on Court 1. That match will be followed by the top seed Oleg Ogorodov taking on yet another qualifier Kamala Kannan. The show-piece of tomorrow is expected to be the contest between Syed Fazaluddin and Vijay Kannan, the third match on Court 1. Among other matches on the first day, Mustafa Ghouse will face Vishal Uppal.
In the doubles, Calcutta pair Saurav Panja and AnandRadhakrishnan defeated second seed combination of Patrick Erhardt and Niko Karagiannis. The Greek-German pair lost the first game 5-7 before managing the second 6-3. However, the Indian duo were too good for them in the deciding set and wrapped the match 6-4.
The other seeded pairs had easy outings with the third seeded Kirtane cousins of Pune, Sandeep and Nitin defeating Vinod Sridhar and David Mccabe 6-3, 6-3.
Revised seedings: 1. Oleg Ogorodov, 2. Vadim Kutsenko, 3.Patrick Erhardt, 4. Syed Fazaluddin, 5. Niko Karagiannis, 6. Danai Udomchoke, 7.Harsh Mankad, 8. Abdulhamid Makhramov.
Qualifiers: Rishi Sridhar, Arun Avinash, P. Sreenivasan, Shailesh Dhoble, Ravi Bhat, David Mccabe, Vishal Uppal, Snehashis Mukherjee, Vijendra Laad, Vishal Gupta, Anjan Viplav, Kamala Kannan, Anand Mukherjee.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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