Some Tennis Talk

Can you name the Indian player except paes, bhupati n sania, playing at the Aussie Open? Puzzled right? I too was when I first read his the name in the Oz open tit-bits page. 

"Check out No.1 boys’ seed Yuki Bhambri from India. The 16-year-old is the No.2-ranked junior in the world and reached the semifinals of the Australian Open juniors event in 2008, where he was knocked out by eventual champion Bernard Tomic. Bhambri plays Germany’s Richard Becker at Margaret Court Arena at 10am."

He is number 2 ranked junior in the world and many articles rate him as the future of Indian tennis. So with Paes and Bhupati so close to (or in) their twilight, Somdev dev varman and Yuki Bhambri are set to take reigns of Indian tennis. I think it will be interesting to see if they can perform well in singles or will they move to doubles (and succeed) just like Paes and Bhupati.

 I follow Somedev rankings since he was in news after winning NCAA twice and the rise has been impressive (as per Indian tennis current standards) and then I watched his quarterfinal win at Chennai open (on TV). It was fun to watch him beat the tallest player (Karlovic-6'10") in the circut. In third round he  beat former world number one Carlos Moya, which i didn't watch expecting the opposite result. After the match he interacted superbly with the media and the cheering crowd. And you know the fun part; the organizers actually gave him a cricket bat and asked him to hit a few tennis balls to the cheering crowd. He missed the first but then hit 3 great sixes. The moral of the story: You can play any sport in India till you have a cricket bat in your hand. 

Now back to Oz open, not able to watch most of the matches, just managing with online scores and match reports, due to clash with office timings. But I still got time to watch 2 quarterfinals and one 4^th round match 1) Nadal beating Gonzalez in fourth round (as expected) 2) Djokovic forfeiting the match against Roddick. I actually liked Djokovic before the match, and was disappointed the way he forfeited the QUARTERFINAL 3) Verdasco beating Tsonga in 4. Till the mid of third Tsonga was playing much better.

Tomorrow semis will start and on Sunday I want to see a Nadal-Federer final just like most of the tennis fans around the globe and Nadal winning in 5 (now that’s just me) 

Didn’t I tell you that I follow tennis these days (since Nadal won 2007 French open)? Watching the game is great fun and still better reading the post-match analysis and articles.