Ramanathan second seed in Chandigarh ITF tournament

Ramkumar Ramanathan has been seeded second and will open against a qualifier in the $15,000 ITF men’s tennis tournament at the CLTA Complex from Tuesday.

It has been a commendable exercise by the former World No. 111, as the 29-year-old Ramkumar has been focusing hard to boost his singles ranking. He has played 15 tournaments to be the second best Indian on the ATP computer at 410, behind the 97th-ranked Sumit Nagal.

The returns from the entry level tournaments are not very attractive, and the effort is always to go to the higher events for better rewards. Ramkumar did show that he has the game and fitness to excel at the Challenger level in singles in recent weeks. It is just a matter of getting more matches at this level to step up into the big league.

So is the case for a few others like Mukund Sasikumar, Siddharth Vishwakarma, SD Prajwal Dev, Sidharth Rawat and the 20-year-old Karan Singh who made the final last week in Delhi, beating the top seed Evgeny Donskoy along the way.

The top seed Khumoyun Sultanov gets a return match against Manish Sureshkumar who beat him in three sets last week. A bunch of players like Madhwin Kamath, Chirag Duhan, Shivank Bhatnagar, Vishnu Vardhan, Dev Javia and Ajay Malik are trying to make the cut from the qualifying event and capitalise on the chance at home.

Only Manas Dhamne is missing as he is busy appearing for his Board exam.