Sixth seed Mustafa Ghouse and eighth seed Ajay Ramaswami were shown the door while three other seeds were given a run for their money in the first round of the US $10,000 Indian Oil ITF Men's Futures tennis tournament in Delhi on Tuesday.
Qualifier and local lad Gurmeher Singh rallied superbly to sent Ramaswami packing, 1-6, 6-4, 6-3, before Vijay Kannan piled misery on Ghouse with a 6-3, 6-4 upset at the DLTA courts.
Top seed Norikazu Sugiyama of Japan, second seed Sunil Kumar Sipaeya and fourth seed Aqeel Khan of Pakistan were stretched till the decider by relatively unknown players before moving into the second round.
Sugiyama needed two hours to overcome the challenge of qualifier Yew Ming Si 6-3, 5-7, 6-3, Aqeel defeated wild card Arindam Datta 6-2, 4-6, 6-1 while Sipaeya won by default as Dominik Stoeckler of Switzerland conceded the match due to cramps with the Indian leading 5-7, 7-6 (7/3), 4-2.
But the day belonged to Gurmeher, who showed that he is steadily improving and has the mental toughness to carry on when the chips are down.
Gurmeher looked down and out when he lost his serve in the first, fifth and seventh games of the first set and was found struggling to get into any sort of rhythm.
He, however, worked hard on his serves in the second set and the efforts paid off as he broke Ramaswami in the ninth game to take the tie to the decider.
Though Ramaswami did all he could in the final set to stop the aggressive Gurmeher but lost his serve in the fifth and ninth game to go down in one hour and 42 minutes.
Gurumeher will now face Jaco Mathews in the next round.
Ghouse, the second casualty of the day, looked completely out of sorts against his crafty opponent. Vijay slowed down the pace of the game tremendously keeping in mind his opponent's preference to hit the ball hard and raced to a 4-1 lead in the opening set.
Ghouse, who had also lost in the first round at Hyderabad last week, looked like coming back in the match as he broke Vijay in the second game of the second set and took a 3-0 lead. But that was not to happen as Vijay won the next five games in a row to win the match in one hour 26 minutes to set up a second round clash with Kamala Kannan.
Sipaeya also looked like joining the other two Indians in the casualty list but Stoeckler was troubled by cramps in his left leg in the second and third set and finally decided to come off after three medical attentions.
In fact, the doctor was kept busy throughout the day as the heat took toll on most of the players who needed medical attention during matches.
In other matches, third seed Vishal Uppal thrashed Takeshi Itoh of Japan 6-3, 6-4 while fifth seed Vinod Sridhar defeated Shivang Mishra 6-3, 6-3.
