Thaindian News

Mysore, June 7 (IANS) Eighth seeded Kittiphong Wachiramanowong from Thailand pulled off the biggest upset of the competition by knocking out top seed Ti Chen (Chinese Taipei) 6-2, 7-6(5) en route to the semi-finals of the Zuari Garden City Mysore ITF Open tennis tournament here Thursday.

The Thai star takes on seventh seeded N Sriram Balaji, who put out No.4 Jeevan Nedunchezhiyan 3-6, 6-2, 7-6 (3), while No.2 Vishnu Vardhan, who beat Sidharth Rawat 6-3, 7-6 (3), meets third ranked Vijayan Malik who exacted a sweet revenge when he defeated Mandya Open champion Saket Myneni 6-3, 3-6, 6-1.

In a stormy tie that lasted 109 minutes, Wachiramanowong hit deep and strong picking up winners with good angles while Chen was visibly upset with couple of line calls and seemed to lose focus.

The Thai Davis Cupper took the first set at 6-2, but Chen came back strongly in the second set and made Wachiramanowong earn every point and also saved a match point at 5-6 to force the tie-break.

Wachiramanowong took a commanding 6-1 lead with Chen committing two double-faults, but dropped the next four points before serving out the match.

An elated Wachiramanowong said: “This is my first victory over Ti-Chen in three meetings. All I did today was kept the ball in the middle and forced him to make mistakes. I hope I keep the same tempo in the next two matches.”

Malik played to a plan and kept the quick moving and hard hitting Myneni to the back court with strong and deep returns. Malik added punch to his power play by serving well throughout the match.

Myneni failed to play at his usual pace and made quite a few unforced errors, hitting wide often and also his big serve lacked bite on the day.

In the first set, Malik broke in the second game, but dropped serve in the third. Malik, however, sustained the pressure for a break in the eighth before serving out the set.

In the second set, it was Myneni who held the whip hand and broke in the second game as Malik conceded a break point with a double-fault and later netted a fore hand. This single break was good enough for Myneni to win the set 6-3.

The decider belonged to Malik who made no mistake as he outhit an error-prone Myneni and broke him twice in the second and fourth games for a 4-0 lead, and went on to wrap up the match.

The results (doubles - semi-finals): Kunal Anand / Ajai Selvaraj bt Venkat Iyer (IND) / Bowen Ouyang (CHN) 7-5, 7-6 (4); 1-N Sriram Balaji / Arun-Prakash Rajagopalan bat Neeraj Elangovan / Fariz Mohammed 6-4, 6-4.