US Open: Rohan Bopanna Wins, Yuki Bhambri and Saketh Myneni Lose

Yuki Bhambri and Saketh Myneni lost their respective opening-round matches in the men’s doubles event at the US Open with veteran Rohan Bopanna being the only Indian to remain in the fray.

The ninth-seeded Polish pair of Hugo Nys and Jan Zielinski comfortably beat Bhambri and his Brazilian partner Marcelo Demoliner 6-3, 7-5 in just about 83 minutes.

Saketh Myneni and his Russian partner Alex Karatsev won the first set in the tie-breaker but were blown away in the next two by Serbian Laslo Djere and Swiss Marc-Andrea Huesler. The Serb-Swiss pair won 6-7 (4-7), 6-3, 6-2. The match lasted one hour and 44 minutes.

Myneni and his Russian partner couldn’t convert the sole break-point opportunity that they got in the entire match, while the winners were able to win three out of the five in the second and third sets respectively.

Also, the Indo-Russian duo was badly let down by nine double faults and more than double the amount of unforced errors (27) compared to the winners (13).

Bopanna and Ebden had defeated Christopher O’Connell and Aleksandar Vukic 6-4, 6-2 to advance to the second round.

The sixth-seeded Indo-Australian pair of Bopanna and Matthew Ebden will play their second-round men’s doubles match against the unseeded duo of Andrey Golubev of Kazakhstan and Russian Roman Safiullin.

The Rohan Bopanna-Matthew Ebden pair had reached the Wimbledon semi-finals back in July and had also won the Qatar Open in February and the Indian Wells title in March.

Bopanna, along with Aldila Sutijadi move into the second round of the mixed doubles with a 7-5 6-2 win over the pair of Andreas Mies and Vera Zvonareva.

Bapanna and Sutijadi will next take on the German-Mexican pair of Giuliana Olmos and Tim Puetz in the second round.

There are no Indian singles players in the main draw of the 2023 US Open as Ankita Raina was knocked out in the third round of the women’s singles qualifiers while Karman Kaur Thandi bowed out in the opening round, whereas Sumit Nagal couldn’t make it past the first round of the men’s qualifiers.

(With inputs from Agencies)