Solaris-ITF: Rastogi,Malik upset

Top seed Bhambri played his best match of the tournament so far against his third straight foreign opponent,eighth seed Richard Becker,not related to Boris but similarly towering,similarly floppy of hair and equipped with a comparably booming serve.

Bhambri didn’t drop serve once,and almost never looked likely to. For a while,it looked like his opponent would be as reluctant to part with service games. But where Bhambri relied on variety and placement of his serves,Becker placed all his faith in power,and ended up with comparable ace and double-faults.

His error-prone ways cost him at identical moments of both sets,when he served with the pressure of a 5-6 scoreline in the back of his mind. In the twelfth game of the first set,he served double faults at love-all,love-15 and 15-40. At the same stage in the second,he served a double-fault while up 40-15 and never recovered,Bhambri taking the next three points,the last courtesy a wide backhand volley from the German.

Another big server,third seeded Vishnu Vardhan,had no such issues with the direction of his thunderbolts in a straight sets win over Karunuday Singh. When Vardhan double faulted at 40-love in the fourth game of the second set,it was the first point he had given up in three consecutive service games. Against this relentless pounding from the serve-and-volleyer,Karunuday had no response and lost 6-1,6-4.