Stopped at the Czech Post

Somdev Devvarman has challenged and beaten a few opponents in the top-50, but the fight was missing in his loss against World No. 6 Tomas Berdych. The Czech completed the mauling against Devvarman in one hour and five minutes with a scoreline of 6-3 6-1.

Berdych won his first two service games to love while Devvarman's many unforced errors led to him facing break points in all but one game in the entire match. In fact the first point he won on Berdych's serve on his own accord came in the last game of the first set. Devvarman, who has several times in the past thrived on crowd support to help him comeback into the clash, couldn't use the cheering to get any momentum in the second set as well. He held serve in the opening game, which was all he managed to win the second set as the 27-year old Berdych unleashed one forehand winner after another. Even when he had his chances, Devvarman couldn't finish the point but kept feeding the ball back to the Czech. Devvarman acknowledged that Thursday's performance was poor and that he still lacked in match fitness.

"It was a very poor performance by me. There is no denying that. Unfortunately it happened over here. I am lacking in matches right now. Definitely not my best tennis today. That being said I do not think even my best tennis could have been good enough against Berdych," Devvarman said.

"The fight was not quite there. What is most unfortunate is that I had worked in the off-season on not giving balls and I just kept doing that. But I'll be back to practice tomorrow morning and I'm determined to make it work for me," he added.

Bopanna, Bhupathi out

Third seeds Rohan Bopanna and his American partner Rajeev Ram lost their second match here despite bageling Stanislas Wawrinka and Benoit Paire in the first set. Lack of enough practice together cost the two as they were mostly caught unwares in the superset-tiebreak in which they managed to win only one point.

... contd.

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