Leander keen on singles

NEW DELHI, APRIL 11: After losing about 55 singles points at the Gold Flake Open at Chennai, Leander Paes will be looking to the Servo-In...

NEW DELHI, APRIL 11: After losing about 55 singles points at the Gold Flake Open at Chennai, Leander Paes will be looking to the Servo-Indian Oil Challenger, beginning here tomorrow, to get his singles play back on track. He has hardly played singles this year and with only a first round win at Chennai to show, the top Indian would be under pressure to get his rankings nearer to the 100.

To begin with, he has the semifinal points gained from last year’s Challenger held at Vadodara (the venue was shifted to Delhi this year) to defend before he can hope to improve his ranking. Last year, he lost to eventual winner France’s Antony Dupuis.

Here, the 102-ranked Paes has been handed a fairly good draw, going merely by the rankings and the kind of opposition other Indians all drawn in the bottom half are facing in the first round. Paes is drawn to meet a seed eighth seeded Swiss Lorenzo Mantaonly in the quarterfinal. For that, he has to get past Australia’s Joseph Sirianni (343) in the first round and the winnerof Israel’s Noam Behr and Czech Republic’s Ota Fukarek in the round of 16.

If the quarterfinals are taken care of, Paes would meet either the fourth seed Neville Godwin or sixth seed Uzbek Oleg Ogorodov, who beat him at the Chennai Challenger a couple of years back, in the semifinal if the seeds play true to form.

But his unseeded doubles partner Mahesh Bhupathi, ranked 321, has drawn Finn Tuomas Ketola (186) who had to qualify for the main draw. That is a tough ask for the big server whose singles career seems to be languishing far below his doubles. His Davis Cup mate Syed Fazaluddin, who got a wild card into the tournament, also meets a qualifier German Andy Fahlke. And if both the Indians win their first rounds, there would be an interesting second round clash between the two. Prahlad Srinath plays South Africa’s Wesley Whitehouse and could run into second seed Vladimir Vlotchkov in the second.

Meanwhile, Paes and Bhupathi are not playing doubles and are expected to play their singles matches onTuesday.

Seeds (with rankings in brackets): Leander Paes (Ind, 102); Vladimir Voltchkov (Blr, 135); Gaston Etlis (Arg, 141); Neville Godwin (RSA, 144); Andre Sa (Bra, 169); Oleg Ogorodov (Uzb, 178); Tuomas Ketola (Fin, 186); Lorenzo Manta, 205)

Story continues below this ad

Qualifying (final round; first named qualifies for main draw): Tuomas Ketola (Fin) b Arjun Sharma (Ind) 6-1, 6-0; Andy Fahlke (Ger) b Sandeep Kirtane (Ind) 6-1, 6-1; Andreas Vinciguerra (Swe) b Pala Petr (Cze) 5-2 (retd); Marcus Hilpert (Ger) b Omar Camporese (Ita) 6-1, 1-1 (retd).