Panja topples Kirtane

Bengal qualifier Saurav Panja played vintage tennis to oust second seed Nitin Kirtane 4-6, 6-4, 6-2 in the first round of the ITF Futures men's tennis tournament, being played at the Maharashtra State Lawn Tennis Association courts, in Bombay, on Tuesday.

On Monday, Israel's eighth seeded Eliran Dooyev had fallen to Sunil Sipaeya and sixth seeded Indian Rishi Sridhar went down Czeck Tomas Janda in three sets.

Panja, years ago was so promising that he was considered Davis Cup material. But for reasons best known to him was unable to live upto the expectations and for the last few years has had to go through the qualifiers.

On Tuesday, Panja countered big server Kirtane's aggression with silken touch successfully. Kirtane tried to serve harder and made more unforced errors in the last set in which he was broken twice.

Once his main weapon of service was gone Kirtane was unable to match Panja.

The remaining five seeds -- top seeded Israeli Eyal Erlich, Jurek Stasiak (3-Austria), Manoj Mahadevn (4-India), Harel Srugo (5-Israel) and Prahlad Srinath (7-India) -- moved into the second round.

Following are the results of the first round:

S Panja bt N Kirtane 4-6, 6-4, 6-2; Billy Wilkinson (America) bt Uday Reddy (Ind) 6-2, 6-1; H Srugo (Isr) bt Vijay Kanna (Ind) 7-6, 6-4; M Deri (Isr) bt Krishna Palivela (Ind) 6-2, 6-2; P Srinath (Ind) bt Tomas Hladil (Czeck) 6-2, 6-2; R Bopanna bt Prateem Parikh 6-1, 3-6, 6-3; Vijayendra Laad bt A Rajgopalan 6-1, 6-4; E Erlich bt Vinod Sridhar 6-3, 6-1; R Volkovitzy (Israel) bt Kedar Shah (Ind) 7-5, 6-7, 6-1; M Mahadevan bt Sidharth Sharma 6-3, 6-0; Shivang Mishra bt Sushant Bihani 7-5, 6-4; Jurek Stasiak (Aus) bt Yasser Mohammed 6-3, 6-2.

UNI