\n
\n
Pune, Feb 1 (PTI): India’s Ramkumar Ramanathan and Arjun Kadhe were ousted in the opening round of Tata Open Maharashtra tennis tournament in Pune on Tuesday, after hard-fought three-setters against their respective opponents.<\/p>\n
While Ramkumar suffered a 6-7 (7-9), 6-4, 3-6 defeat against eight seed Stefano Travaglia, local boy Kadhe lost 6-7 (5-7), 7-6 (6-4), 6-2 to Joao Sousa.<\/p>\n
The fourth edition of South Asia’s only ATP-250 Tour event is organised by the Maharashtra State Lawn Tennis Association.<\/p>\n
Both Ramkumar and Travaglia looked in good touch as they played aggressively in an intense first set.<\/p>\n
At 4-4, the Chennai-born player responded well and hit back hard to make it 6-5 before the set went into tie-breaker. Travaglia sealed the set with his big serves.<\/p>\n
The top-ranked Indian took control of the second set with a 4-2 lead. He then snatched it quite comfortably in the end with a brilliant serve to level the scores at 1-1.<\/p>\n
However, the World No 93 Travaglia made a strong comeback in the decider to take 5-3 lead. Serving for the match, the Italian didn’t let the momentum slip to pocket the set as well as the match.<\/p>\n
Earlier, the 28-year-old Kadhe made former World No 28 Sousa work hard for each point in the nail-biting first two sets which went into the tie-break.<\/p>\n
However, the Indian’s challenge came to an end after the Portuguese took the charge of the game in the final set and completed a win convincingly.<\/p>\n
“It was a tough match, he’s (Sousa) a world class player. It was a really close second set, one or two points I could have played better and won that match,” Kadhe said after the match.<\/p>\n
In other round-of-32 singles matches, sixth-seed Emil Ruusuvuori of Finland outclassed last edition’s semi-finalist Egor Gerasimov in straight sets 6-0, 7-6 (13-11).<\/p>\n
The 22-year-old Ruussuvuori later ended the day with one more win to seal a place in the doubles quarter-finals, partnering Italian Gianluca Mager. The pair upstaged the fourth-seeded Australian duo of Marc Polmans and Matt Reid 6-4, 6-4.<\/p>\n
Bernabe Zapata Miralles and Aleksandar Vukic also advanced to the second round with contrasting victories in their respective matches.<\/p>\n
Spanish player Miralles, who made his Grand Slam debut at the French Open last year, had an easy task against Denis Novak as he secured a 6-4, 6-1 win without breaking a sweat.<\/p>\n
However, 25-year-old Australian Vukic recovered well in time after being a set down to complete a thrilling 2-6, 6-2, 7-6 (7-4) victory. Vukic is now set to face second-seed Italian rising star Lorenzo Musetti on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
On Monday, India’s Prajnesh Gunneswaran suffered a hard-fought opening round defeat 6-7 (5-7), 2-6 against the fifth seed Daniel Altmaier.<\/p>\n
\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Pune, Feb 1 (PTI): India’s Ramkumar Ramanathan and Arjun Kadhe were ousted in the opening round of Tata Open Maharashtra tennis tournament in Pune on Tuesday, after hard-fought three-setters against their respective opponents. While Ramkumar suffered a 6-7 (7-9), 6-4, 3-6 defeat against eight seed Stefano Travaglia, local boy Kadhe lost 6-7 (5-7), 7-6 (6-4), […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-183071","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183071","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=183071"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183071\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=183071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=183071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=183071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}