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Tennis
Challenger tourneys postponed
By Our Special Correspondent
NEW DELHI, JAN. 2. The Challenger tennis tournaments scheduled to be held in Chandigarh and Delhi in February have been postponed to December.
The National grasscourt tennis championship scheduled to be held from March 25 in Calcutta has been shifted to start from February 11.
The Calcutta unit, Paes en Sport, run by Dr. Vece Paes, father of Leander Paes, will be conducting both the National championship and the Challengers.
The Challenger tournaments at home have generally been the best platform for Leander and Mahesh Bhupathi to gain valuable singles ranking points in recent times, and the shift of dates has apparently been done to suit their calendar.
The rest of the Indian players have generally struggled to make an impression in these $ 25,000 tournaments, and it was not a surprise that the bunch of Prahlad Srinath, Vijay Kannan, Rohan Bopanna, Mustafa Ghouse, Ajay Ramaswamy and Sunil Kumar could not cross the first qualifying round in the mega event, the $ 400,000 ATP Tour event in progress in Chennai.
In fact, the shift in the dates of the Challengers have been made with an eye to prepare the Indian players for the Tata Open in Chennai, as much as to give Leander and Mahesh a fair chance to be at their best singles form for the Tour event. It is a judicious move, considering the below-par fare provided by Leander and Mahesh in singles in Chennai, as they returned straight from a vacation.
There will be three Challengers in Mumbai, Delhi and Chandigarh from December 9, 16 and 23 respectively.
The ATP Tour would wind up with the Masters series tournament in Paris on November 3, and there is no mention of the World Doubles Championship in the ATP calendar as yet, though the week of November 4 has been kept blank for the same. The $ 3.7 million ATP Masters Cup for the top eight singles players will be held in Shanghai from November 11.
Meanwhile, the $ 15,000 Futures tournaments scheduled to be held in Jorhat and Mumbai do not find a mention in the revised calendar of the All India Tennis Association (AITA). These events were to be held in the third and fourth weeks of December.
Instead, there will be three Futures tournaments in Chandigarh, Indore and Bangalore from October 21, November 4 and 11 respectively. The four-week Satellite circuit has been shifted from October 28 to August 5, to make room for the Futures.
Quite noticeably, there will be six AITA ranking tournaments for men, to build themselves up for the international circuit.
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