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Second seeds Rohan Bopanna and Edouard Roger-Vasselin’s good run at the Open 13 in Marseille, France came to an end when they bowed out in the semi-finals of this ATP 250 tournament on Friday. The Indo-French pair was outclassed 1-6, 4-6 by the fourth seeded Kiwi-British combine of Marcus Daniell and Dominic Inglot in just 51 minutes.
Bopanna and Roger-Vasselin could not show the fighting spirit that they had displayed in their last couple of matches at this tournament when they came back from a set down to grab the win. They conceded three breaks of serve, two of which were in a heavily one-sided opening set.
The second seeds won 74% of their first serves but were pretty shabby on returns. They managed to earn just one break point in the whole match, which they failed to convert.
This was the second semi-final of the season for Bopanna and Roger-Vasselin. They reached the last-four stage in their very first outing of the season at the Sydney International, where they narrowly went down to the Wimbledon champions Lukasz Kubot and Marcelo Melo.
Balaji and Gunneswaran exit Kyoto Challenger
Bopanna was not the only Indian to suffer a defeat on Friday. Earlier in the day, the unseeded all-Indian team of N Sriram Balaji and Prajnesh Gunneswaran also had to bite the dust in the semi-finals.
The two went down 4-6, 6-7(6) to the Japanese pair of Go Soeda and Yasutaka Uchiyama in a hard-fought match that lasted 1 hour 12 minutes. The Japanese made use of their solitary break point chance in the first set while the two pairs exchanged a break of serve in the second set.
Sharan loses in Delray Beach
Earlier on Thursday, Divij Sharan and Scott Lipsky squandered a one-set lead to go down 6-3, 3-6, 5-10 to the third seeds Ben McLachlan and Hugo Nys in the quarter-finals.
Sharan and Lipsky were aiming to reach the semi-finals of an ATP World Tour event for the second time this season, having done that at the Sofia Open earlier this month.
