Prajnesh Gunneswaran thread

[sameerph]

Prajnesh is at a new career high singles ranking of 169 this week with his French open qualifying points added. Excellent progress by him this year starting from a ranking in 240's.

And as we know he qualified for his first ATP main draw at Stuttgart over the weekend. When his those points get added, he will further move up close to 160.

[Omkara]

At this rate he is over taking Ramk pretty soon

[PKBasu]

At 169, Prajnesh is still #18 on the all-time India ranking list. Live rankings now have him at 159, which takes him to 17th on the all-time India list. Beating Shapovalov today would take him to 151.

[Omkara]

At this rate he is over taking Ramk pretty soon

He will for sure. It looks like his game is more all round compared to Yuki and Ramk.

[PKBasu]

With his victory over Denis Shapovalov (CAN, 25), Prajnesh moves up to 151 in the live ATP singles rankings. That will vault him to #15 on the all-time ATP ranking list among Indian professionals.

[sameerph]

Someone posted an interesting stat on twitter. Prajnesh is only the 8th Indian player to win an ATP main draw match since 2000.

2000- Leander Paes - Chennai
2003- Prakash Amritraj - Indianpolis
2006- Rohan Bopanna - Chennai
2008- Karan Rastogi- Chennai
2008- Somdev Devvarman - Washigton
2010 Yuki Bhambri - Kuala lumpur
2014 Ramkumar Ramanathan - Chennai
2018 Prajnesh Gunneswaran - Stuttgart

Of course most of them have gone on to win multiple matches at ATP level ( except Karan I think).

[Omkara]

Someone posted an interesting stat on twitter. Prajnesh is only the 8th Indian player to win an ATP main draw match since 2000.

2000- Leander Paes - Chennai
2003- Prakash Amritraj - Indianpolis
2006- Rohan Bopanna - Chennai
2008- Karan Rastogi- Chennai
2008- Somdev Devvarman - Washigton
2010 Yuki Bhambri - Kuala lumpur
2014 Ramkumar Ramanathan - Chennai
2018 Prajnesh Gunneswaran - Stuttgart

Of course most of them have gone on to win multiple matches at ATP level ( except Karan I think).

Bops??

[sameerph]

Bops had main draw ATP on grass courts in UK and Newport. His first win was Chennai 2006 as mentioned in above list.

[PKBasu]

That's a sobering list. We have really had a drought of world-class players except Somdev since the turn of the century -- until the past 12 months with the emergence of Yuki and Ramkumar, and Prajnesh in the past 2+ months.

Mahesh Bhupathi had just two ATP main draw wins -- one over Prahlad Srinath at Chennai, and another over Daniel Nestor (then ranked 128) at LA.

Our current crop are far more impressive as singles players. Saketh could well have joined this threesome (plus young Sumit), but sadly injuries seem to have felled him.

[PKBasu]

Bopanna had a few ATP main draw singles wins -- he won a couple of rounds at Newport in 2008 (losing the QF to Prakash after beating Fish in R2), he beat Verkerk in DenBosch (R1) the same year, and he won a round at the ATP Kuala Lumpur in 2009. He also qualified into Queen's (2013) and Halle but didn't win a round. A better ATP singles record than Bhupathi (although the latter did better in Davis Cup).
(In my previous post about Bhupathi, those wins were in 1996 and 1997 and so predated the period of the list).

[jayakris]

Someone posted an interesting stat on twitter. Prajnesh is only the 8th Indian player to win an ATP main draw match since 2000.

It is misleading to say 2000. If I am not mistaken, we have had only the same 8 people in almost 25 years, to have won a round in an ATP. That is since 1993 July 5th when Ramesh Krishnan won his last match - R1 at Gstaad ATP against Pioline.

[arjun2761]

If we go back to 1993, you have to add Mahesh Bhupathi, so that would make it 9.

Looking at this list, it's surprising that neither Mahesh nor Rohan could crack the top 200 in ATP singles rankings even though they were decent singles players as they showed in Davis Cup. Perhaps, their doubles success came in the way of focusing on singles success. To a lesser extent this was also true for LP who spent less than 1 year in the top 100 although his singles peak came in 1996-98 right before he and Mahesh had unprecedented doubles success in 1999 when they made all 4 GS doubles finals.

[Sin Hombre]

When was the last time we had 3 players in the top 150 (not quite yet but hopefully soon)?

[rajitghosh]

Someone posted an interesting stat on twitter. Prajnesh is only the 8th Indian player to win an ATP main draw match since 2000.

2000- Leander Paes - Chennai
2003- Prakash Amritraj - Indianpolis
2006- Rohan Bopanna - Chennai
2008- Karan Rastogi- Chennai
2008- Somdev Devvarman - Washigton
2010 Yuki Bhambri - Kuala lumpur
2014 Ramkumar Ramanathan - Chennai
2018 Prajnesh Gunneswaran - Stuttgart

Of course most of them have gone on to win multiple matches at ATP level ( except Karan I think).

Bops??

Saketh? And change it to male player please. Quite a few women have won main draw matches on the WTA tour.

[prasen9]

Is Rajit Ghosh Andy Murray in disguise? (More power to you btw.)

I don't think MB or RB were top-200 quality for any reasonable period of time. They over-achieved in Davis Cup because the crowd and the occasion lifted them. But they could not do that for multiple matches at the ATP level. RB could have been top-200 but his main tool was his booming serve. So, he was top-200 on grass-courts only.