The effects of a derailed schedule, due to inclement weather, continued to be felt on the third day when two more seeded players were knocked out of the $10,000 ONGC ITF Futures men's tennis tournament at the Doon School complex in Dheradun on Wednesday.
India's Vijay Kannan and Oleg Ogorodov of Uzbekistan, the seventh and eighth seeds, made first round exits as the players struggled to pull themselves out of the rustiness that has set in due to inaction.
Kannan, the Afro-Asian Games gold medallist, lost to Manoj Mahadevan 4-6, 3-6 while Ogorodov went down to national hard court champion Vinod Sridhar 6-7(6/8), 4-6.
The cold that has gripped the hill station for the past four days finally relented though and the sun came out in full, making way for much of the backlog of matches to be cleared.
As many as 19 matches were held today, some of them at the Indira Gandhi National Forest Academy courts, but the programme was still a day behind schedule, meaning the final will be held on Sunday.
There was loss of seeds in other ways too, with second seed Mikhail Elgin and fourth seed Vadim Davletshin of Russia not turning up.
Following the defeat of sixth seed Sunil Kumar Sipaeya to Vishal Uppal yesterday, only three seeds have moved into the second round.
But top seed Harsh Mankad had it smooth, winning 6-1, 6-1 against France's Phillipe De Bonnevie whereas third seed Aisam Qureshi of Pakistan and fifth seed Matwe Middelkoop of the Netherlands had to fight off the lethargy to advance.
Qureshi, perhaps, had the toughest match of the day, bouncing back from the loss of a tense first set to put it across Holland's Melvyn Opder Heijde, a player ranked nearly 200 places below him. He won 6-7(3/7), 6-4, 7-5.
Middelkoop too faced a first set deficit before winning 3-6, 6-1, 6-4 against Ajay Ramaswami.
There were some interesting match-ups too for those closely following the Indian juniors. In the battle of qualifiers, Tushar Liberhan beat Jaco T Mathew 6-1, 6-7(3/7), 6-5, his first ever win at this level.
Liberhan was serving for the match 5-4 in the second set but Mathew broke back to win that tenth game at love. The latter unfortunately suffered cramps at the climax of the decider, a result of three truncated qualifying rounds ahead of the main draw match, and lost serve at 5-6 to make his exit.
Wild cards Karan Rastogi and Somdev Dev Varman, the two top junior players in the country, tasted defeats at the senior level. The former lost to Punna Vishal 2-6, 6-3, 5-7 while the latter found the going tough against Russian lucky loser Sergei Krotiouk 4-6, 6-3,1-6.
