Mustafa Ghouse, Vinod Sridhar ousted in second round

Two huge upsets were witnessed as top seed Mustafa Ghouse and fancied Vinod Sridhar were shunted out in the second round in the third and final leg of the ITF men's Futures tournament in Davangere, Karnataka, on Wednesday.

Qualifier Sriranga Sudhakar ousted Ghouse, winning 6-4, 3-6, 6-3, while Nitin Kirtane accounted for the scalp of Sridhar, the winner of the second leg, after a two-and-a-half hour battle at 6-3, 3-6, 7-6(7-2), to enter the quarter-finals.

Others who made it to the last eight were third seed Vijay Kannan, Ajay Ramaswami, Manoj Mahadevan, Harsh Mankad, Boris Borgula of Slovakia and Anton Kokurin of Uzbekistan.

Sudhakar, who recently completed his education in the US, played with determination. He gained the crucial break in the 10th game of the first set, with Ghouse serving to stay in the match.

The top seed, however, was on a high in the second set as he attacked the net and ended rallies at will. He broke Sudhakar, who hails from Karnataka, in the fifth and ninth games to take the set at 6-3 and level the scores.

But Sudhakar came back strongly in the decider as Ghouse seemed to lose his rhythm. He broke the top seed in the third and ninth games to seal a place in the last eight.

The Kirtane-Sridhar match saw as many as 14 service breaks, with eight of them coming in the final set, four in the first and two in the second.

Yesterday's report
Ramaswami upsets Sipaeya