Cotton City climax to wild card race

Coimbatore, March 7: From the Temple City to the state capital, the AITA caravan has finally screeched to a halt in Coimbatore for the third and final leg of the Gold Flake Aces Tour 99. The Cotton City, six years ago, was a beehive of tennis activities. It also boasted of strong players — the KG brothers (KG Ramesh & KG Suresh), R Karthikeyan, Manoj Kumar, KV Ganesh and Ramanand — in its ranks. However, things came to a standstill. The top players moved out of the city for greener pastures and during the last three years there were absolutely no top class tennis tournaments, barring a few junior state ranking tourneys. The Gold Flake Aces tour scheduled to begin here tomorrow however, has given a new fillip to the game. Madurai and Chennai, which hosted the first two legs respectively, witnessed a bunch of young talents battling it out hard for valuable AITA points. Former Davis Cup star Sandeep Kirtane of Maharashtra, winner at Madurai, already heads the singles list with 42 points. Close on his heels areNational Games gold medalist Vinod Sridhar of Tamil Nadu, Davis Cup stand-bye Vijay Kannan of Delhi, 34 points each, and Nitin Kirtane of Maharashtra with 30 points.Nitin, Sandeep’s cousin, did not play the Madurai leg. At Chennai, he struggled a bit against Vijay Kannan in the final, but managed to come good. Much is expected of him here.

The championship assumes great importance for this fearsome foursome as they not only stand to gain AITA points but, also one of them will get a wild card for the Gold Flake Open International Tournament to be held at Chennai SAF stadium in April, along with a bonus air ticket to London.

Results (qualifiers final round): P Vishal (AP) bt CD Ajay 6-2, 7-5; Udhayakumar Reddy (TN) bt Kamalesh Shukla (UP) 6-4, 6-4; Mukundan (TN) bt Rahul Gandhi (TN) 6-4, 7-5; Manoj Kumar (Rlys) bt Ronny Sarkar (WB) 6-2, 6-0; S Ganesh (TN) bt J Jaya Balaji (TN) 6-2, 6-4; R Narendran (TN) bt Vivek Satyajit (Delhi) 7-5 (conceded).