Pune: A fiery Ramkumar Ramanathan was fluent in his 7-5, 6-1, 6-0 win over Finn Tearney while Yuki Bhambri struggled past Jose Statham 7-5, 3-6, 6-4 as India completed an emphatic 4-1 victory over New Zealand in the Davis Cup Asia/Oceania Group I tie, here Sunday. Ramkumar won his tie in exactly two hours while the inconsequential fifth rubber lasted 115 minutes.
India now play their second round tie at home in April against Uzbekistan, who got past South Korea in their first round away tie.
Ramkumar the 22-year-old from Chennai, with a singles world ranking of 276, was chaired and thrown high in the air by the entire squad after which the entire team ran a lap of the stadium with the Indian Tricolor.
The resounding victory for India also signalled the end of Anand Amritraj’s three-year reign as the team captain as he will be replaced by Mahesh Bhupathi for the second round tie against Uzbekistan.
Ramkumar clinched a closely fought 51-minute first set and Tearney’s game went to pieces thereafter as the Indian seized on the opportunities and ran away with the second and third sets. In the three sets Ramkumar served 12 aces interspersed with nine double faults. The Kiwi player on the other hand did not have any aces and committed a staggering 16 double faults, 10 of which came in the first set only.
It was only in the first set, that Ramkumar had to face breakpoints on his serve, three in the second game and two in the eighth, but overcame all with elan. He won the first set when Tearney committed three double faults to hand the game to his opponent.
Ramkumar, in spite of committing five double faults including three in the third game, which he held, raced away with the second set by breaking his error-filled rival’s serve twice – in the fourth and sixth games.
Ramkumar, by now playing with increased dominance and cutting down on the number of errors closed out the match and with it the tie in India’s favour by winning the third set without dropping a game.
The Bhambri-Statham encounter had turned inconsequential, but produced the best quality of tennis in the last three days. Both players played some fluent ground strokes and in the end, it was Bhambri’s decisiveness in coming to the net which turned the match in his favour.
PTI
