Aryan Shah has a bright start

Top Indian tennis players face tough competition in the Dafanews $100,000 Delhi Open Challenger tournament at DLTA Complex.

It will be another big opportunity for the cream of Indian tennis to capitalise on a high-quality event in the Dafanews $100,000 Delhi Open Challenger tennis tournament at the DLTA Complex from Monday.

The opposition will be stiff as two of the three Indian wild cards run into seeded players in the first round.

Davis Cupper Karan Singh will open the campaign on Monday against eighth seed Timofey Skatov of Kazakhstan. It is virtually a home court for Karan who had trained at the National centre for quite some time. He may not be that familiar with the pace of the centre court but will be keen to show his big game as he had done in the Davis Cup tie recently.

S Mukund will play fourth seed Lloyd Harris of South Africa. Mukund, who led the Indian team to a 4-0 victory over Togo at the same venture in the Davis Cup tie, will have one more day to tune his game for the challenge.

Ramkumar Ramanathan will face the semifinalist of the Challenger last week in Chennai, Dalibor Svrcina of the Czech Republic in the first round.

In the qualifying event on Sunday, Aryan Shah beat third seed Blake Ellis of Australia 6-4, 6-3 and will play Masamichi Imamura of Japan in the second and final qualifying round on Monday.

Sidharth Rawat went down f6-3, 4-6, 6-7(2) to fifth seed Alexey Zakharov. Parth Aggarwal and Chirag Duhan bowed out to Kimmer Coppejans of Belgium and Jiri Vesely of Czech Republic respectively.