Sanam goes down fighting to Inayatov

Sanam Singh suffered a first round loss for the second successive week as he bowed out of the ITF Satellite tennis second leg in New Delhi on Monday.

Sanam, who had failed to reach the second round last week, went down to Murad Inayatov of Uzbekistan 6-4, 3-6, 3-6 at the DLTA Complex.

Contrary to what the scoreline might suggest, the Chandigarh lad was by far the better player on the day.

The 17-year old outclassed Inayatov on many occasions with his great sense of anticipation and ability to generate pace even when the Uzbek tried to vary it.

But the Indian made numerous unforced errors as he went for the lines often from impossible positions.

Wild card Vishnu Vardhan was another home challenger to exit, going down 4-6, 6-3, 2-6 to Korean Kim Hyung-Kwor.

Jacob Melskens of Denmark ousted Guilherme Ochia of Brazil 6-2, 5-7, 6-3 in another first round match.

Later, Sanam combined with local lad Vivek Shokeen to knock out Yur Bezeruk of Australia and Kazakhstan's Dmitri Makeyev 6-2, 3-6, 6-3 in the doubles first round.

Top seeds Inoyatov and Alexey Kedriouk of Kazakhstan put out the challenge of Ravishankar Pathanjali and Vinod Sridhar 7-5, 6-1.

Second seeds Vishal Uppal and Mustafa Ghouse overcame Arun Prakash Rajagopalan and Kaushik Raju 7-6 (5) 7-6 (1) while Vijay Kannan and Ashutosh Singh had an unexpectedly easy outing against Tushar Liberhan and Navdeep Singh 6-1, 6-4.