US Green Clay Challengers, April 2022

[PKBasu]

Sumit Nagal makes his comeback in this Challenger on green clay. Prajnesh is also in the main draw, meeting the top seed, Dennis Kudla, in R1.

Yuki/Saketh are in the doubles draw, as is Jeevan Nedunchezhiyan.

[R1] PR-Yuki Bhambri/Saketh Myneni (IND/IND) vs. WC-Martin Damm/Alex Rybakov (USA/USA)
[R1] Jeevan Nedunchezhiyan (IND)/Gijs Brouwer (NED) vs. PR-Andrew Harris/Jason Kubler (AUS/AUS)

[R1] Sumit Nagal (IND, 251) vs. Jason Kubler (AUS, 194)
[R1] Prajnesh Gunneswaran (IND, 239) vs. 1-Dennis Kudla (USA, 81)

[sameerph]

Tough matches for our singles players. Prajnesh meets top seed and Sumit meets a player who is in good form after winning couple of back to back 25K futures recently. Hope Sumit is getting back in good shape. Not expecting much in first few weeks since return.

This is the start of 3 week challenger series on green clay. The week after this is Tallahasse where RamK too will join Prajnesh and Sumit and than Savannah where Sumit and RamK will be there. We will add these 2 tournaments to the thread later.

Hope Yuki-Saketh will play doubles in all 3 weeks and can we hope Yuki playing singles qualies in one of the 3 weeks ?

[sameerph]

Sumit fell away after a good start.

[R1] Sumit Nagal (IND,258) l. Jason Kubler (AUS,182) 64 26 36

In terms of shotmaking, Sumit was mostly a better player but just made too many errors later on in the match. Hope it is only rustiness and he is physically ok.

[arjun2761]

Hope he came out injury free. Looks like he fought hard throughout the match but just couldn't hold his serves getting broken 8 times in 14 service games and facing an astonishing 24 break points!

[jayakris]

I didn't expect him to win this after such a long time away from competitive tennis. This was actually a promising comeback match against a good quality opponent. He definitely did better than I expected, though it was a loss.

[sameerph]

Prajnesh too lost against top seed Kudla after winning the first set.

[R1] Prajnesh Gunneswaran (IND,238) l. (1) Dennis Kudla (USA,82) 64 46 26

Oh well, both the matches could have been upset wins by our guys but they fell away in the end.

Our doubles teams Yuki/Saki and Jeevan with partner play today'.

[arjun2761]

Both our doubles players win relatively easily.

Watched part of the Yuki/Saketh match it really looked like a top 50 player playing with 3 top 500 players in terms of the returns and ground strokes.

[sameerph]

Both our pairs lost in the QF though. Yuki-Saketh lost 7-10 in super tie break. Jeevan and his partner lost in straight sets against second seeds.

Disappointing result for Saki-Yuki but nevertheless Saketh will be back in top 200 after this week. He is 193 in live rankings and Yuki up to 369.

Next week RamK, Prajnesh and Sumit are all in main draw at Tallahassee and Yuki-Saketh are in doubles main draw. RamK will mostly play doubles with someone probably Jeevan.

[sameerph]

Changed the thread name to include all 3 challengers in this series in this thread.

Next week, we have a bigger contingent with RamK and Purav joining the team.

At Tallahassee Challenger

Singles

[R1] Sumit Nagal (IND,258) vs. Michel Mmoh (USA,196)
[R1] Ramkumar Ramanathan (IND,176) vs. (5) Tomas Barrios Vera (CHI,144)
[R1] Prajnesh Gunneswaran (IND,238) vs. Christian Harrison (USA,297)

Doubles

[R1] Ramkumar Ramanathan (IND) / Purav Raja (IND) vs. (4) William Blumberg (USA) / Max Schnur (USA)

[R1] Yuki Bhambri (IND) / Saketh Myneni (IND) vs. Tennys Sandgren (USA) / Mikael Torpegaard (DEN)

[Sanjay]

I am waiting for Yuki to get back to singles. I don't have much hope with the other 3.

[sameerph]

Bad loss for Prajnesh.

At Tallahassee Challenger 80

[R1] Prajnesh Gunneswaran (IND,273) l. Christian Harrison (USA,327) 36 36

Prajnesh's ranking has fallen to 273 now and this was the last week which counted for French open qualies. So, French open qualies is out for him now. I think first time he would be missing grand slam qualies in some time. He will need a deep run somewhere in next 4 weeks if he has to make it to Wimbledon qualies.

[Rajiv]

Sumit and Ram also join Prajnesh in making a ignominious R1 straight sets exit.

Sumit got baggeled in S2, and Ram looked totally listless and unmotivated in his match and without even a token resistance went on to record his 10th consecutive R1 loss of the year.

[vparam]

Just a sad and embarrassing set of results for our boys. I’ll give Sumit a pass as he’s just coming back from injury, but seriously do we have anything to look forward to in singles in the near future? This is just so depressing as all of our players will soon be outside the top 300.

[arjun2761]

On the positive side both our doubles teams cleared the first round!

[Atithee]

Damn the doubles. Tired of doubles everywhere. Enough.