Sport - Tennis   

Weather disrupts schedule

By Our Special Correspondent

DEHRA DUN NOV. 17. It looked an extended holiday for the players, as bleak weather played havoc with the schedule, in the ONGC $10,000 ITF Futures tennis tournament at the Doon School Complex here on Monday.

After three days of intermittent play, the qualifying event, featuring three rounds in a draw of 48, had not yet been completed. The enthusiastic organisers were hopeful that the programme would be back on the rails, if the weather held good.

While the action was entertaining for the sparse local gathering and a bunch of kids at the school, Harsh Mankad and company were a bit worried about the situation, as they would be playing a match straight-away without adequate practice.

For, the practice courts at the Indian Military Academy (IMA) and the Indira Gandhi National Forest Academy (IGNFA) were taken over for completing the backlog of matches in the qualifying event, leaving the players entered directly into the main draw, warm up with a round of football or jogging in the sprawling complex.

The top-seeded Harsh will start against a qualifier, while Sunil Kumar will run into the lanky Vishaal Uppal in the first round. Vinod Sridhar will be up against the eighth-seeded Oleg Ogorodov, though the Uzbek is here more as a coach for a talented bunch than a professional player, who was No.1 in Asia at one stage of his career.

Nitin Kirtane will be keen to get back his winning touch while starting against Alexander Pavlioutchenk of Russia.

Karan Rastogi will play a qualifier and another wild card entrant Somdev Dev Varman will challenge the fourth-seeded Vadim Davletshin of Russia. Vijay Kannan will meet Manoj Mahadevan, while Mustafa Ghouse will play Michael Ouvarov of Britain. Ajay Ramaswami will face the fifth-seeded Matwe Middelkoop of the Netherlands.

The referee Puneet Gupta said that there would not be any doubles qualifying event, and hoped to get on with the main event by Tuesday afternoon. There were still three second qualifying round matches left unfinished, and Jaco Mathew was leading 6-3, 2-1 against Gurmehar Singh in the only final round qualifying match played in the day.

The results: Qualifying event (second round): Yaroslav Sorokin (Ukr) bt Amod Wakalkar 6-2, 6-4; Nick Crawley (GBR) bt Shreyansh Sacheti 6-3 6-1; Saurav Panja bt Timur Lomtatidze (Rus) 6-4, 6-0; Sergei Krotiouk (Rus) bt Divij Sharan 7-6 (7-2), 6-1; Phillipe De Bonnevie (Fra) bt Eduard Khan (Uzb) 6-4, 6-4; Punna Vishal bt Benoit Foucher (Fra) 6-3, 6-1; Adrian Gavrila (Rom) bt Ashutosh Singh 6-4, 7-5; Dmytro Tolok (Ukr) bt V. M. Ranjeet 6-3, 6-3; Tushar Liberhan bt Kamala Kannan 6-3, 7-6 (7-2); Ivan Anikanov (Ukr) bt Gafur Ishmatov (Uzb) 6-3, 3-6, 6-1; First round: Ritesh Chitlangiya bt Indra Kumar Mahajan 6-2, 6-2.

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