Maharashtra Open 2022 | Ramkumar Ramanathan and Rohan Bopanna advance to semis in men's doubles

02/04/2022

On Thursday, India's Rohan Bopanna and Ramkumar Ramanathan qualified for the semi-finals of the men's doubles at the Maharashtra Open 2022. The second seeds, Bopanna and Ramkumar beat Alexander Erler of Austria and Jiri Vesely of the Czech Republic 7(7)-6(3), 7(7)-6(4) in the quarterfinals.

Both teams got off to a solid start in the opening set, holding all of their serves. The Indian duo, on the other hand, won the tiebreaker, with Rohan Bopanna putting his volleys to good use.

Forth the second set, all four players put in strong performances to force a second tiebreaker. With the score tied at 4-4, the Bopanna-Ramanathan duo took three straight points to close out the set and the match, which lasted one hour and 25 minutes.

In the semi-finals, the Indian couple will face Fabien Reboul and Sadio Doumbia of France, who won the Adelaide International in January.

On Thursday, Vishnu Vardhan and Sriram Balaji also advanced to the semi-finals.

Vardhan and Balaji were given a walkover after their quarter-final opponents, Gianluca Mager and Emil Ruusuvuori, withdrew owing to Mager's injury before the start of the match.

The Indian singles challenge came to an end earlier in the day as Yuki Bhambri fell 6-3, 6-2 against Stefano Travaglia of Italy in the round of 16 encounters.

With his win over Slovakia's Jozef Kovalik, Bhambri became the first Indian to advance to the second round in singles.

In singles, Ramkumar Ramanathan, Arjun Khade, and Prajnesh Gunneswaran all failed to go past the first round.

The biggest shock came when the unseeded Elias Ymer defeated the top-seeded Aslan Karatsev.