Seeds fall by the wayside

Seeds fall by the wayside
EXPRESS NEWS SERVICE

SEPT 13: The 13th turned out to be unlucky for the top two seeds Sai Jayalakshmy and second seed I-Ting Wang as they crashed out of the $<\!q>10,000 Khodays ITF Circuit women's tennis tournament at the Bangalore City Institute courts on Wednesday.

The first set went with serves until the fourth game where Radhika broke Wang to go 3-1 up. In the eighth game, Radhika again broke Wang to walk away with the first set 6-2.

In the second set, it was the same story as Tulpule broke Wang in the fourth game to go 3-1 up. Radhika closed out the match on her serve in the ninth game with a cross court winner and earned a place in the quarter-finals where she will meet Yamini Tukiyandi.

The Sai-Shruti match started interestingly with none able to hold serve till the ninth game of the first set. The match spilled into the tie-breaker which Shruti won.

Sai committed five double faults in the second set and was not consistent enough. She finally netted a forehand to give Shruti the match at 7-5.

The winner Shruti Dhawan said about her opponent: ``She (Sai) played better than she had played at Delhi. She was more accurate here.''

Sixth seed Jennifer Schmidt of Austria had an easy outing accounting for Marutha Devi 6-1, 6-2 in just 45 minutes. Jennifer will clash with fourth seed Sonal Phadke in the quarterfinals on Thursday.

Results: Rushmi Chakravarthi bt Nandita Chandrasekar 6-2 6-3; Yamini Tukiyandi bt Arthi Venkataraman 6-3 5-7 6-1; Jennifer Schmidt (Aut) bt Marutha Devi 6-1 6-2; Sonal Phadke bt Nikita Bharadwaj 6-2 6-0; Archana Venkataraman bt Geeta Manohar 6-1 6-0; Radhika Tulpule bt I-Ting Wang (Taipei) 6-2 6-3; Veronika Raimrova (Cze) bt Tara Kanbargimath 6-2 6-0; Shruti Dhawan bt Sai Jayalakshmy 7-6 (9-7) 7-5.