Tame end to two Indian wild cards

Calcutta, Feb 14: Indian duo Prahlad Srinath and Mustafa Ghouse, both wild card entrants, made their exit from the singles event losing ch...

Calcutta, Feb 14: Indian duo Prahlad Srinath and Mustafa Ghouse, both wild card entrants, made their exit from the singles event losing cheaply to Takahiro Terachi of Japan and Dejan Petrovic of Australia respectively on the inaugural day of the Indian Oil-Servo Cup ATP Challenger Tennis Tournament at South Club Courts on Monday.

While Mustafa submitted meekly to Petrovic 6-1 6-3, Srinath raised some hope before bowing out to Takahiro 6-4 7-6 (7-4).

The Srinath-Takahiro match saw the latter dominating the first set. Takahiro broke Srinath in the second and sixth games to take a 5-0 lead and held his service to win the set 6-1. Srinath consolidated and began the second set with dogged determination. In the tie break Takahiro kept his cool to win 7-4 and clinch the issue. The Mustafa-Petrovic encounter began with Petrovic taking the first set in no time breaking Mustafa in the first, fourth and sixth games. In the second set, Mustafa performed a little better but that was not enough to pose any problem tothe superior Petrovic, who broke Mustafa’s service in the fourth game.

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The main attraction and top seed Leander Paes will play his first match on Tuesday against Dimitri Tomashevich in the first round.

Other results

Men’s singles (1st round): Gregory Carraz (France) bt Nicolas Thomann 6-2 4-6 6-4; Marx Guillaume (France)bt Leonardo Azzaro (Italy)7-5 6-2, Andy Ram (Israel)bt Noam Behr (Israel) 3-6 7-5 6-3.

Men’s doubles (1st round): Oleg Ogrodov & Tomas Hevich (Uzbek) bt Rohan Bopanna & Rishi Sridhar 6-7 (7-1) 6-2 6-4; Syed Fazaluddin (Ind) & Cedric Kauffmann (France) bt Tomas Anzari (Czech) and Satoshi Iwabuchi (Japan) 6-4 6-7 (7-2) 6-4; Enrique Abaroa (Mexico) & Ashley Fisher bt Igor Gaudi (Italy) and Mose Navarra (Italy) 7-5 4-6 6-4.

EXCLUSIVE: EC brings in feature to check misuse of identity to seek voter list deletions

Political Pulse3 min ago

The Election Commission has launched a new 'e-sign' feature on its portal and app to prevent fraud. This comes after allegations of misuse of online voter deletion forms in Karnataka. The feature requires voters to verify their identity using their Aadhaar-linked phone numbers, reducing the possibility of fraud.

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