Matches are made on court!

All the quarterfinal matches were played today amid soaring doubts on the possibility of the play with the incessant drizzling. But, the zeal of the players won over the hearts of the rain-gods and the court was made available to the players in time, thanks to Murugan and the ball-boys.

We had our tough opponent, Prem and Praveen. Mahesh could only hold one serve and I lost my first two serves. When we trailed the match 1-6, we lost all the hopes in the Heaven! :-) I had lots of fun struggling to put the new balls in play with the enormous bounce they had on the wet surface. The speed and the spin of the returns from Prem was difficult to deal with though occasionally my parter was able to attack the superb forehand of Prem. But, I think Prem/Praveen are beatable if the shots are controlled and percentage play is in play. :-)

Two of the other quarterfinal matches were pretty close and gave a nail-biting thrill to the spectators :) One, Gopal/Harveen against Mitra/Vigyan and two, Aravind/Balliga against Sagar/Srinivas. The former had to be decided with the tiebreak and the latter was a win for skills and consistency. Mitra/Vigyan seemed initially lost their fervor with Gopal fighting alone mostly for each point! Finally, he succumbed to the aggressive games of the former. Result: Mitra/Vigyan won 10-9! Aravind/Balliga too showed that they were the potential candidates for the finals with Balliga's powerful smashes at the net and Aravind's serves and slices!

Finally, on-court histrionics made the matches! :D