The Hindu : Sport / Tennis : Karan beats Liu

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Sport

Sport - Tennis

Karan beats Liu

Kamesh Srinivasan

NEW DELHI: Karan Rastogi hit a bad patch midway but wriggled out of self-imposed shackles to record a 7-6(7), 6-4 victory over the former Asian junior champion Tai-Wei Liu of Chinese Taipei in the first round of the $15,000 ITF men's Futures tennis tournament at the DLTA Complex here on Monday.

The 19-year-old Karan started brilliantly as he served and stroked close to his best in racing up a 4-1 lead, even as the Taipei left-hander struggled to keep pace.

However, Karan lost focus briefly and saw Liu breaking back in the seventh game and saving breakpoints to be on par at 4-4.

Plenty of drama

There was a lot of drama in the tenth game when the 20-year-old Taipei lad showed considerable expertise in saving as many as six setpoints to eventually force the tie-break.

Karan led 4-0 in the tie-break before a couple of doublefaults saw him lose the initiative. Then, Liu delivered a doublefault to face two further setpoints, but saved them both and in fact held a setpoint himself at 7-6 when Karan came up with yet another of his ill-timed doublefautls.

Thankfully, Karan played a lot sharper thereafter and hit an inside-out forehand winner to take the set, bringing a sigh of relief from his coach Sanjay Poddar who was perplexed by the sudden dip in the form of his ward who had otherwise been stroking with good feel and felicity.

Competent handling

Karan was not serving that well into the second set and dropped his serve twice before handling the crunch with competence. The best thing about Karan's game, more than the punch in his shots, was his quick and measured steps on court.

The results:

Singles (first round): Karan Rastogi bt Tai-Wei Liu (Tpe) 7-6(7), 6-4; Vinod Sridhar bt Rishi Behl 6-4, 6-3; Navdeep Singh bt Varun Walia 6-2, 6-4.

Doubles (pre-quarterfinals): Alexey Kedriouk (Kaz) & Murad Inoyatov (Uzb) bt P.C. Vignesh & Kinshuk Sharma 6-2, 6-2; Tushar Liberhan & Navdeep Singh bt Aditya Madkekar & Rahil Makharia 6-2, 6-2; Henry Adjei-Darko (Gha) & Sunil Kumar bt Burnham Arlidge & Matthew Taylore (GBR) 6-2, 6-2; Rishi Behl & Saurabh Singh bt Sandeep Kumar & Honey Rana 6-2, 6-1; Tai-Wei Liu (Tpe) & Nitin Kirtane bt Nikunj Siwach & Vijay Siwach 6-0, 6-1; Mustafa Ghouse & Kamala Kannan bt Sumit Prakash Gupta & Varun Walia 6-1, 6-4; Divij Sharan & Vivek Shokeen bt Dmitriy Makeyev (Kaz) & Vishnu Vardhan 6-4, 6-4; Vinod Sridhar & Vishaal Uppal bt Shivang Mishra & Punna Vishal 7-6(3), 6-3.

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