Ghouse, Uppal to meet in final

Seventh seeded Mustafa Ghouse of Maharashtra stunned top seed Vinod Sridhar to set up a men's singles title clash with third seed Vishal Uppal, who halted the giant-killing run of unfancied Rohan Bopanna, in the senior National grasscourt tennis championships in Calcutta on Friday.

In the women's singles, former champion Manisha Malhotra justified her top billing by sailing into the final with a 7-6 (7-5), 7-1 win over fifth seed Shruti Dhawan.

Malhotra, the 1999 title holder, will meet third seed Rushmi Chakravarti, who pulled off an upset 6-1, 6-1 victory over second seed Sonal Phadke, in the final.

Twenty-year-old Karnataka boy Bopanna, who accounted for second seed Vijay Kannan and fifth ranked Manoj Mahadevan on his way to the semis, seemed to lose concentration at crucial moments and went down 4-6, 6-7 (3-7) to his higher ranked Delhi rival in 81 minutes.

The other semi-final saw Ghouse capitalise on Sridhar's weakness on grass to carve out a 7-6 (7-2), 6-3 win in 88 minutes to romp into the final.

In the first set, Ghouse broke the top seed in the ninth game to lead 5-4 but failed to maintain the lead with Sridhar breaking back in the very next game. Ghouse finally closed the set by winning the tie-break 7-2.

Sridhar bounced back in the second set by breaking his rival in the fifth game, but Ghouse raised the tempo winning four games on the trot including two breaks in the sixth and eighth to run away with the set and the match.

The Bopanna-Uppal encounter began with the latter sending down perfect serves and volleys. But 24-year-old Uppal rode on his experience to break his opponent in the vital tenth game to take the first set 6-4.

The second set rolled into a tie-break after Uppal dropped serve in the first and seventh games while Bopanna suffered the same fate in the second and fourth. However, Uppal looked unstoppable in the tie-break, winning 7-3 to sail into the title round.