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Srinath loses in Wimbledon qualifier

Prahlad Srinath lost in the first round of the Wimbledon men's singles qualifying tournament on Monday.

Ranked 359 on the ATP rankings, the Mysore-based player put up a good fight before going down to Nicklas Kulti of Sweden 6-7(3), 5-7.

Srinath went up 3-0 and 5-2 in the first set, but double-faulted on break point at 5-3 up. The match then went with serve before Kulti won the tie-break pretty handily.

The second set went pretty much like the first, with Srinath getting an early break. And with Kulti serving a second serve at 2-4 (15-40) things looked good for the Indian. However, Srinath missed a couple of return of serves and then made three unforced errors on his own serve to be broken. At 5-5, Kulti was serving at 0-40, but a couple of return errors by Srinath on second serves and a couple of good Kulti serves allowed the Swede to hold. Then at 5-6, Srinath saved four match-points and had a couple of easy volleys to hold, but missed them and lost the match.

It was a tough loss for Srinath as he had a lot of chances to win.

Today, Nirupama Vaidyanathan will face 9th seed Vanessa Webb of Canada. Nirupama had lost In the previous encounter between the two in an Australian Challenger at the end of 1998.