Nur-Sultan 2 Challenger, Kazakhstan, March 1-7 2021 (Indoor hard)

[sameerph]

Tough loss for Praj in semis against an in form player.

[SF] (8) Prajnesh Gunneswaran (IND,134) l. Tomas Machac (CZE,166) 36 61 26

[arjun2761]

Prajnesh lost to the Jurij Rodionov of this week (aka hot player) in Machac. Prajnesh had the better ground shots but he served 5 double faults at inopportune times and also had more UFEs. Otherwise, this was a winnable match for Prajnesh.

[VReddy]

I just watched some parts last night and it was 1 set all. Happy to see how PG pulled through after being down 2-5. Great job against a higher ranked player.
Prajnesh is on an upswing but so is Machac. It will be hard to beat him. PG is now slightly better in terms of ranking but not by much.

Machac is world No. 46 in UTR world rankings. He has had a 5 setter against Fritz and 4 setter against Berretini. Defeated Top 100 Kwon with a score of 2 & 1. He is only 20 yrs old. Definitely playing top 70 tennis but rankings will take time to adjust due to everyone holding points from 2019.

Prajnesh needed to be at his best to compete and he was. It's just he missed easy putaways back to back at 2-3 40-30 which made him face breakpoint and then lost momentum after that.

[Dinesh]

That loss hurts because Doha had to sign in doubles players to fill in the qualifying draw slots and even give Byes to some players and now he wasn’t considered for a main draw wildcard either.

[sameerph]

Yes, Prajnesh would have been the 4th seed in qualies with a first round bye and would have easily made the main draw with his current form. Anyway, such things happen. He played well in these 2 weeks and got back to pretty good form after a bad start to the year. Mostly he will be Dubai ATP next.