Spain’s Enrique Lopez-Perez and Jeevan Nedunchezhiyan will lead the 32-player field at the MCC-S.R. Subramaniam Memorial ITF Futures tennis championship in Chennai on Monday.
Lopez-Perez, the World No. 253, comes into the tournament on the back of a semifinal finish and a title win in his two previous Futures outings. Jeevan (321), on the other hand, has had a less successful tune-up, a quarterfinal and second round exit. He will try to get back to winning ways on his home turf as he opens the proceedings on Monday against a less-fancied Jatin Dahiya, ranked nearly a 1000 places below him.
Other Indians in the fray are third seeded Sanam Singh and fourth seeded Sriram Balaji. R. Ramkumar, who created quite a sensation defeating Somdev Devvarman at the Aircel Chennai Open early this year, but has had a quiet few weeks since then, is seeded five. He has a tough opener against Vishnu Vardhan, who enters in a rich vein of form — one final and two semifinal finishes in the last three events.
The results (qualifying, final round): Ronak Manuja bt Samyukth Balaji 6-1, 6-1; Ashwin Vijaraghavan bt V. Jeevan 6-0, 6-1; Vincent Van Den Honert (Ned) bt Anvit Bendre 6-1, 6-3; Sai Saran Reddy bt Ajai Selvaraj 3-6, 6-2, 6-4; Ronit Singh Bisht bt Raswant Ravi 6-0, 6-2; Shotaro Goto (Jpn) bt Ko Suzuki (Jpn) 2-6, 6-2, 6-2; Vignesh Veerabhadran bt Arpit Sharma 6-2, 6-1; Suraj Prabodh bt Neeraj Elangovan 6-7(3), 6-4, 6-3.
