Tennis News
At $450K Chennai Open ATP Tennis Tournament, India (5 - 11 Jan 2009)

Reuters Photo

[R2] (WC) Somdev Devvarman (IND,202) bt (6) Carlos Moya (ESP,42) 46 75 64

[QF] (WC) Somdev Devvarman (IND,202) vs (4) Ivo Karlovic (CRO,25)

Doubles
[R1] (1) Mahesh Bhupathi (IND)/ Mark Knowles (BAH) bt (WC) Prakash Amritraj (IND)/ Somdev Devvarman (IND) 76(3) 76(8)
[R1] (2) Lukas Dlouhy (CZE)/ Leander Paes (IND) l Bjorn Phau (GER)/ Rainer Schuettler (GER) 64 26 (7)10

And Somi DID it!!! In evenly contested match Somi scored biggest upset of his small career on ATP tour beating former WR #1 and current WR #42 Carlos Moya ... Somi finished this match in 2 hours and 14 minutes to move into quarter finals of 2009 Chennai Open.

This was well contested match as both players having similar style and ability to play long rallies ... Both players had many break points opportunities, 10 for Somi's and 7 for Moya, in the match ... Somi converted 3 of those and Moya managed to convert 2 ... Both players had 58% first serve percentage and 80% first serve points won ... Somi was better in second serve points winning percentage 56% and Moya managed to win 48% ... Again Somi showed good serving skill, he served 10 aces and 2 double faults, other hand Moya managed 3 aces and 4 doubles faults ... In overall points win, Somi won 5 points more in comparison with Moya, 97-92 ... That tell us story how much this match was close.

This win will give Somi total 45 ranking points and that will help him to move inside top-180 ATP ranking ... C'mon Somi.

In doubles Somi had another long match, which ended after 2 tie-breaks after 1 hour 43 minutes ... That also means today Somi was on the court for almost 4 hours ... I hope tomorrow his legs will be fresh against Karlovic.

But second seed pair of Lee and Lukas started on wrong feet ... They lost against German pair in super tie break ... In the first set our pair was down 1-4 but they played exceptionally well to win next 5 games to clinch first set but afterwards everything went against them.

Somdev Devvarman - "I believed I could pull it off from the very beginning. I did the right things to come back (in the match), I was hanging in there well after a few baseline points. Moya was trying to create a lot of things. He was trying too hard to get past. But I just going back. (about his poor display in the first set) I was not as solid as he ought to have been."