Vishnu Vardhan capped off a successful week by winning the men’s doubles event at the ATP Astana Challenger with Japanese partner Toshihide Matsui on Saturday.
The top-seeded Indo-Japanese duo defeated the Russian team of Evgeny Karlovskiy and Evgeny Tyurnev 7-6(3), 6-7(5), 10-7.
The two teams traded a break of serve each in the first set, before the top-seeds took the set after winning the tie-break 7-3. No service breaks were forthcoming in the second set and it, too, was decided through the tie-break.
This time around though, it was the Russians who took the set enforcing a match tie-break to end the deadlock. In the ensuing ten-point tie-break, while the Russians tied stepping up their challenge, Vardhan and Matsui were a shade better as they clinched the tie-break, and the match, with a three-point lead.
This is Vardhan’s second ATP Challenger title this season. He and partner N Sriram Balaji had won the $75,000 ATP Fergana Challenger in Uzbekistan in June.
Leander Paes and Sam Groth go down fighting in Newport semi-finals
The third-seeded team of Leander Paes and Sam Groth bowed out in the semi-final of the Hall of Fame Open in Newport on Friday. The top-seeded team of Aisam-ul-Haq Qureshi and Rajeev Ram beat the Indo-Australian duo 4-6, 7-6(6), 11-9 in a lengthy tussle that lasted almost two hours.
Earlier, it was Paes and Groth who set the tempo of the match by winning the first set. They also looked to be the team to reach the final, gaining a couple of match points over their higher ranked opponents.
However, Qureshi and Ram fought back by first saving the match points and then by winning the second set in the tie-break. The match tie-break was also keenly contested by the two teams, before Qureshi and Ram staved off the upset by taking it narrowly 11-9.
In the final, Qureshi and Ram will play the Australian team of Matt Reid and John-Patrick Smith. The unseeded duo defeated fellow Australians Alex Bolt and Andrew Whittington in their semi-final, 6-2, 4-6, 10-5.
