NEW DELHI: Karan Rastogi shrugged off his bad touch in time to record a 6-7(5), 6-4, 6-1 victory over the fifth-seeded Petar Jelenic of Croatia in the quarterfinals of the State Bank of Saurashtra ITF men's Futures tennis tournament at the DLTA Complex here on Thursday.

The 20-year-old Rastogi turned the match around in the ninth game of the second set as he broke the Croat at love, and stamped his authority with a backhand down the line winner on setpoint in the next game.

Thereafter, Rastogi called the shots and reeled off six games in a row after the strongly-built Jelenic had won the first game of the decider.

The fourth-seeded Rastogi could have saved some energy but for squandering two breaks of serve in the first set. He got broken after going 3-0 up and again at 5-3.

In the tie-break also, Rastogi made two errors after getting to 5-5 to lose the set.

The loss of the first set seemed to have helped Rastogi regroup while his opponent did not have the wherewithal to fight his way back, once he lost the second set.

The other Indian in the singles quarterfinals, Ashutosh Singh, went down in three sets to Todor Enev of Bulgaria.

Singh played a good match but was not sharp with his volleys at the crunch and paid for it against an opponent who had razor-sharp ground-strokes, especially on the backhand side.

Rastogi will be challenged by the unseeded Enev while the other semifinal will feature the top-seeded Alexey Kedriouk of Kazakhstan against Hyun-Woo Nam of Korea.

The results:

Singles: Quarterfinals: Alexey Kedriouk (Kaz) bt Sarvar Ikramov (Uzb) 6-4, 6-4; Hyun-Woo Nam (Kor) bt Aisam-ul-Haq Qureshi (Pak) 6-4, 6-4; Karan Rastogi bt Petar Jelenic (Cro) 6-7(5), 6-4, 6-1; Todor Enev (Bul) bt Ashutosh Singh 6-2, 3-6, 6-2.

Doubles: Semifinals: Alexey Kedriouk (Kaz) & Sunil Kumar bt Vijay Kannan & Pathanjali Ravishankar 6-4, 6-0; Todor Enev (Bul) & Hiroki Kondo (Jpn) bt Stephen Amritraj & Mustafa Ghouse 6-3, 3-6, 6-4.

Quarterfinals: Kedriouk & Sunil bt Aditya Madkekar & Purav Raja 7-5, 6-3; Vijay Kannan & Pathanjali bt Hsin-Han Lee & Tsung-Hua Yang (Tpe) 6-1, 7-6(4); Enev & Kondo bt Navdeep Singh & Vishnu Vardhan 6-2, 3-6, 6-1; Amritraj & Ghouse bt Vinod Sridhar & Vishaal Uppal 6-4, 6-4.

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