Ramaswamy pips Sipaeya in thriller

Wild card Ajay Ramaswamy pipped former National champion Sunil Kumar Sipaeya 2-6, 6-4, 7-6 (7-2) while former Davis Cupper Prahlad Srinath shocked third seed Jerzy Jurek Stasiak of Austria 6-4, 6-4 on the way to the men's singles semi-finals in the $10,000 ITF-Futures tennis tournament in Bombay on Thursday.

In the quarter-final duel between two wild cards, Ramaswamy played a solid baseline game to overpower Sipaeya in a match which lasted 2 hours 18 minutes while Srinath took 1 hour 24 minutes to dispose off the Jurek.

In the other quarter-finals, top seed Eyal Erlich of Israel drubbed lucky loser Tomas Janda of Czech Republic 6-1, 6-3 in 43 minutes while unseeded Rohan Bopanna sidelined giant-killer and compatriot Saurav Panja 6-1, 6-2 in just 38 minutes.

The Pune-based Ramaswamy, who lost the first set at 2-6 with the Haryana lad breaking in second and eighth games, staged a grand rally. He broke Sipaeya in the first game of the second set but failed to hold his serve in the second. He, however, got the crucial break in the seventh game and then served out the set 6-4.

In the decider, the players broke each other at will, with Ramaswamy dropping serve in the second, sixth and eighth games and then finding breaks in the third, fifth and ninth games to force the tie-break.

Ramaswamy ran up a 6-0 lead in the tie-breaker, which also included a penalty point slapped on Sipaeya for racquet abuse, before winning 7-2.