Chennai Open 2014 - Ramanathan and Devvarman produce fireworks to bring in the New Year

Ramkumar Ramanathan at the post-match press conference

Somdev Devvarman may not be on the wrong side of 30, and Ramkumar Ramanathan may not quite be the long-awaited heir of Indian tennis, but in some ways, their clash today in the Chennai Open 1st round felt like a poor man’s Serena Williams vs Sloane Stephens. The most successful active player from the country against a greenhorn; a wily veteran against a brash upstart. And while the quality of this match may not have been a patch on the Serena-Stephens encounter in Melbourne last year, the level of drama in it, and the result – a 4-6, 6-3, 6-4 decision in favour of the upstart – were similar.

The start of the match, however, didn’t suggest a conclusion nearly as tense as it actually got. The very first point of the match was a bit of a disaster for Ramanathan. Trying to go around his backhand to crush an inside-out forehand, he was pulled hopelessly wide of the tramlines. To make matters worse, he didn’t come close to ‘crushing’ the ball, and he could only flail his arms in desperation as Devvarman’s soft pickup sailed out of his reach. He managed to hold serve though, which was probably incentive enough for him to continue using the run-around-the-backhand ploy all match. And just as well; Ramanathan’s backhand, even considering this small sample size of a single match (it’s unlikely that any tennis follower outside Chennai had ever seen him play before this tournament), seems woefully short on quality.

Still, that is scarcely cause for alarm, because his laser forehead more than makes up for his backhand deficiencies; at any rate, it certainly did in this match. The tall 19-year-old makes full use of his height, hitting his forehand with uncommon flatness. The shot, especially its inside-out version, troubled Devvarman all night, and the only real problem for Ramanathan on that wing was his occasional tendency to overcook it.

Going into the match, Devvarman held a serious edge in terms of experience, but he also gave up plenty of ground in the power department. Some of Ramanathan’s second serves were clocked faster than Devvarman’s first serves – that’s how big the disparity was. Perhaps the most awkward moment of the match came at 3-4 in the first set, when Devvarman hit a second serve ace; it took everyone, including Devvarman himself, seemingly, by surprise.

Despite his limitations, however, Devvarman stuck to his defensive guns, and calmly pocketed the first set 6-4 with a couple of neat serve-n-volley plays. But Ramanathan was growing in confidence all the time, and he even seemed to be slowly winning the spectators over.

At the start the crowd was almost entirely pro-Devvarman, with shouts of “Come on Somdev!” regularly floating around. Ramanathan is a homegrown player, but Devvarman was the infinitely more recognizable one, which made him an automatic favourite. But as the power and aggression that Ramanathan brings to the table became more and more evident, the allegiance of the crowd started wavering. Midway through the match things became decidedly confusing, and at one point someone in the crowd, seemingly unable to make up his mind, shouted “Ramdev!”.

The change in the crowd’s preference seemed to lift Ramanathan even higher, as he started finding the range on his forehand, hitting it with more margin for error. The newfound patience coupled with the already supersonic pace of shot in Ramanathan’s play seemed to rattle Devvarman, who made a bunch of uncharacteristic errors, particularly at the net, to give up the second set 6-3.

More of the same followed at the start of the third, with Ramanathan dictating play and Devvarman struggling to catch up. But in tennis, there is no better test of nerves and composure – two things that only improve with age – than a deciding set in a top-level match. With the early break and the momentum in his favour, Ramanathan promptly contracted the yips and surrendered the advantage back, getting broken at 2-1. Errors suddenly started pouring off his racquet like water, prompting the chants of “Let’s go, Ram!” to change into “Hey Ram!”. His double faults, of which there were many, inspired similar reactions – a collective ‘tsk tsk’ seemed to go around the stadium after one particularly ghastly double.

Even so, Ramanathan got several more chances to take back the initiative, only for Devvarman to dig in deep and keep denying him. But at 4-4, deuce, things were taken out of Devvarman’s hands. Ramanathan unleashed another of his booming inside-out blasts, and it caught Devvarman off-guard. But the shot seemed to have either grazed the line or fallen squarely outside it, and Devvarman had no hesitation in challenging the umpire’s ‘in’ call. Unfortunately for him, Hawk-eye chose that precise moment to play truant; everyone was then made to wait for what seemed like eternity for the replay to show up on screen. The crowd, always on the lookout for a chance to make some noise, took that as their cue to begin hollering chants of ‘Somdev! Somdev! Somdev!’ (now that Devvarman had started looking like the underdog, they were back in his corner, if only temporarily).

Eventually, the umpire announced that the Hawk-eye replay would not, in fact, be available for that point, which meant that the original call stood and Devvarman was break point down. The apparent injustice of it all didn’t go down well with Devvarman, who let a few words fly and lost the next point tamely, allowing Ramanathan to serve for the match.

All this while, Ramanathan kept trying to get the crowd behind him, constantly thumping his chest and exhorting the fans to raise their volume. The Chennai lad is unusually expressive for a player of his age; he seems supremely comfortable in his skin (he even applauded a couple of shots hit by Devvarman during the match), and is not afraid to bare his emotions on the court. That could either be a good thing or a bad thing in the long run, depending upon whose example you consider (being emotive didn’t work for Federer, but it works for Nadal). But today, it definitely was a good thing; he rode the cheers and chants all the way to the finish line, wrapping up the contest on his first match point as the crowd throatily roared its approval.

Ramanathan even seems to have got the celebratory gesture down pat; as he crushed one last forehand past Devvarman, he fell flat on his back and stared at the sky for a minute or two, before rushing back up and sportily shaking hands with his fallen foe. The only time Ramanathan did betray his age was at the customary post-match hitting-the-ball-into-the-stands stunt; when asked by the organizers to hit a few tennis balls to the crowd with a cricket bat, Ramanathan got so excited that he completely missed the first hit that he attempted. He righted himself just in time, however, hitting the next few shots so powerfully that they threatened to sail out of the stadium.

This is not exactly a changing of the guard; Devvarman is far from done in his career, and Ramanathan has played a grand total of one ATP match his entire life. But it’s nice to know that Indian tennis can have its own version of Serena vs Stephens, no matter how obscure the comparison may be.

This article was originally published here: Aircel Chennai Open official website