Bengaluru: Wild card entrants SD Prajwal Dev and Niki Poonacha brought cheers to the Indian camp when they overcame the better-ranked Canadian-Japanese combination of Steven Diez and Rio Noguchi to reach the doubles quarter-finals of the Bengaluru Open 2 ATP Challenger event here on Wednesday.
The Indian youngsters beat their higher-ranked rivals 6-2, 6-4 en route to the last-eight stage of the doubles event.
Arjun Khade, who will take on third seed Frenchman Enzo Couacaud in the singles pre-quarterfinal match on Thursday, combined with Austrian Alexander Erler to breeze past the duo of Bogdan Bobrov (Russia) and Dominik Palan (Czech Republic) with a 6-0, 6-3 victory.
Also advancing to the quarter-finals was the all-Indian pair of Saketh Myneni and Ramkumar Ramanathan, who had won the doubles title at the Bengaluru Open 1 last week.
Meanwhile in men’s singles, the two seeds in action on Wednesday — top seed Aleksandar Vukic and sixth seed Max Purcell both from Australia — registered contrasting wins to advance to the quarter-finals at the KSLTA Courts here on Wednesday.
While Vukic brushed aside the challenge of Gre’t Britain’s Jay Clarke in straight sets 6-1, 6-3, Purcell the Australian Open doubles finalist struggled past his compatriot Marc Polmans with a 7-6 (7), 4-6, 6-2 victory to join Vukic in the last eight.
Purcell, who had played another rival from Down Under — Jason Kubler — in the first round did face some strong competition from Polmans. Both of them brok’ each other’s serves in the third and fourth games with Polmans breaking once again in the seventh game to lead 4-2. Purcell came back strongly, winning the next four games to lead 6-5, and was serving for the set when his opponent broke his serve and pushed the set into a tie-breaker, which he won at 7.
The second set saw Polmans getting an upper hand by galloping to a 3-0 lead with breaks in the first and third, but his country-mate returned the favour in the next three games and held the 7th game to gain a 4-3 lead. However, the 24-year-old Polmans took advantage of Purcell’s mistakes and won the next three games to bag the set 6-4.
The decider also proved to be a humdinger with both players going hammer and tongs. Purcell was up 3-0 when his opponent came back to win two games on the trot but the better-ranked player showed his mettle when it mattered to close out the match-winning three consecutive games.
Meanwhile, Vukic completely dominated the proceedings against his British opponent and raced to a 5-1 lead with breaks in the 4th and 6th game. The 25-year-old Vukic’s strong down-the-line shots almost shocked Clarke and by the time he could find an answer to his rival’s attack, he had already lost the first set. He did put up a little resistance in the second set, especially in the fourth game where he broke the favourite’s serve. However, he could not sustain the form as he lost serves in the 7th and 9th and succumbed easily in exactly an hour.
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