The Hindu : Sport / Tennis : Aqeel

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Sep 13, 2004

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Sport - Tennis

Aqeel — the man to beat

By Kamesh Srinivasan

NEW DELHI, SEPT. 12. He may be seeded only fourth, but Aqeel Khan of Pakistan will be the man to beat in the ITF Futures tennis tournament to be played at the DLTA Complex here from Monday.

The 24-year-old Aqeel is fresh from winning a similar tournament in Hyderabad on Saturday. For someone who did not have a single ATP point earlier in the season, the Pakistani has collected 77 ATP points to take his ranking into the top 375.

After a good run in the Indian Satellite where he pocketed 29 ATP points and finished No.2 in the circuit, Aqeel went on to win the Satellite circuit back home in Pakistan and added another 36 ATP points to his collection. He got 12 more for winning the tournament in Hyderabad.

With the Davis Cup Asia-Oceania tie against New Zealand scheduled at home next week, Aqeel may not go all out this week, having already exhausted himself over five weeks of professional tennis. All the same he will not make it easy for any of his opponents. He starts against wild card Arindam Datta and figures in the same quarter as the sixth-seeded Mustafa Ghouse. The latter starts against Vijay Kannan.

Sunil Kumar, Vishaal Uppal, Vinod Sridhar, Ajay Ramaswami, Kamala Kannan and Punna Vishal will be the main Indian contenders.

The top-seeded Norikazu Sugiyama of Japan had won the Satellite circuit here and knows the conditions very well.

The winner here will get 18 ATP points and the runner-up 12.

The results (Final qualifying round): Yew Ming Si (Mas) bt Aditya Madkekar 6-1, 6-3; Xiao Peng Lai (Hkg) bt Rahil Syed 7-6(5), 3-1 retired; Rupesh Roy bt Wang-Cheng Hsieh (Tpe) 6-2, 6-2; Arjun Goutham bt Virali Murugesan Ranjeet 6-3, 7-5; Shivang Mishra bt Dai-Chiao Lin (Tpe) 7-5, 3-6, 6-2; J. Vishnu Vardhan bt Varun Walia 6-2, 6-4; Gurmehar Singh bt Shreyansh Sacheti 6-3, 6-4; Martin Sayer (Hkg) bt Yannick Nelord 6-4, 6-2.

Second round: Yew Ming Si bt Wayne Wong (Hkg) 6-3, 4-6, 5-4 retired; Aditya Madkekar bt Narendran Ranganathan 6-1, 6-2; Rahil Syed bt Sandeep Kumar 4-6, 7-5, 1-0 retired; Xiao Peng Lai bt Siddharth Gulati 7-6(2), 6-1; Wang-Cheng Hsieh bt P. C. Vignesh 6-2, 6-1; Rupesh Roy bt Kaushik Raju 6-1, 6-0; Arjun Goutham bt Yoann Villar (Bel) 6-1, 6-4; Virali Murugesan Raanjeet bt Anjan Viplav 6-2, 6-3; Dai-Chiao Lin bt Jitin Bishnoi 6-3, 6-1; Shivang Mishra bt Sujai Reddy 6-0, 6-2; J. Vishnu Vardhan bt Devender Singh Bhusari 6-2, 6-3; Varun Walia bt Rafiq Paruti 6-7(4), 6-3, 6-0; Shreyansh Sacheti bt D. Pritish Kumar 6-1, 6-2; Gurmehar Singh bt Kedar Tembe 6-3, 6-3; Yannick Nelord bt Ajai Selvaran 7-6(4), 6-3; Martin Sayer (Hkg) bt Vijayendra Laad 6-2, 4-6, 6-0.

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