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Indian tennis players had mixed fortunes on Tuesday with Rohan Bopanna winning his match at the Open 13 in Marseille, but Leander Paes crashed out of the Delray Beach Open. Bopanna and Edouard Roger-Vasselin, who are seeded second, had to work hard for their first round win at this ATP 250 tournament in France.
Having been outclassed by the British-Greek pair of Ken Skupski and Stefanos Tsitsipas in the first set, the Indo-French combine stormed back to clinch the 2-6, 6-3, 10-6 win in 1 hour 3 minutes. Bopanna and Roger-Vasselin could earn just a solitary break of serve and conceded a couple of service breaks. They finished with a total of 58 points while Skupski and Tsitsipas could bag 52.
Next up for the second seeded pair is the American-Canadian duo of Jamie Cerretani and Adil Shamasdin.
Bopanna and Roger-Vasselin will look to make it to the semi-finals of an event for the second time this season. They reached the last-four stage in their very first outing together this year at the Sydney International, where they succumbed to a narrow defeat to the Wimbledon champions Lukasz Kubot and Marcelo Melo.
Paes and Raja’s misery continues
Over at the ATP 250 event in Delray Beach in Florida, USA, Leander Paes and Purav Raja’s campaign turned out to be very short-lived as they were sent packing in the first round. The all-American combine of Jack Sock and Jackson Withrow comfortably beat them 6-3, 6-2 in 50 minutes.
The Indian duo could secure just one break of serve and dropped their own serve as many as four times.
Raja and Paes notched up an excellent upset win over former Australian Open champions Jamie Murray and Bruno Soares in the second round at the season’s opening Major, but since then it has gone downhill for them. They are currently on a three-match losing streak.
Leander, however, did win a Challenger title in between when he teamed up with Jamie Cerretani and reached the final of another in partnership with Joe Salisbury.
Meanwhile, at the Kyoto Challenger in Japan, second seeds Jeevan Nedunchezhiyan and Christopher Rungkat crashed out in the first round with a 3-6, 1-6 loss to Zhe Li and Stephane Robert.
