Kamal Ghorui
MELBOURNE: On a day when fans across the grounds were reaching for their jackets, alternates Sriram Balaji and his Austrian partner Neil Oberleitner lent some cheer to the Indian contingent when they stopped the French-Aussie pairing of Pierre-Hugues Herbert and Jordan Thompson 7-6 (4), 3-6, 7-6 (8) in two hours and 43 minutes in a men’s doubles first-round clash at the Australian Open.Go Beyond The Boundary with our YouTube channel. SUBSCRIBE NOW! The Indo-Austrian pair, playing in matching salmon-pink gear, went ahead 6-2 and 8-5 in the match tie-break, but Herbert and Thompson narrowed the gap to 7-8 before Balaji ripped a return winner on the second match point to close out the opener. Balaji and Oberleitner will play the fourth seeds Marcelo Arevalo and Mate Pavic in the second round. Meanwhile, Yuki Bhambri and Swede Andre Goransson will take on Mexico’s Santiago Gonzalez and Dutchman David Pel in the second round. In the mixed doubles, Bhambri and American Nicole Melichar-Martinez bowed out in the first round, falling 4-6, 6-7 (3) to the sixth seeds, China’s Shuai Zhang and German Tim Puetz. Bhambri and Melichar-Martinez led 4-2 in the first set, but the sixth seeds won the next four games. It was a bit of a struggle from there on for the Indo-American pairing. Indian-American Nishesh Basavareddy, ranked 242, and who took the qualifying route to the main draw, went down 1-6, 4-6, 3-6 in just under two hours to the 15th-seed Russian Karen Khachanov in the second round of the men’s singles.
