Banthia Shocks Last Year Runner-up Prabodh at Fenesta Nationals

New Delhi, Oct 2 (PTI) A confident Siddhant Banthia used his experience of playing at the junior Grand Slams to knock out the fourth seed and last year's runner-up Suraj Prabodh from the men's singles event of the Fenesta National Tennis Championship here on Tuesday.

In an impressive show, Banthia played an all-round game to oust Prabodh 6-3 6-1 in his opening round.

The 18-year-old moved swiftly on the court, stroked fluently and was always in control of the proceedings.

He opened up the court to spray winners easily even as Prabodh looked like a pale shadow of himself.

"The junior Grand Slam level is equal to India's men's circuit. As I am making a transition from junior to senior, the experience of playing at junior Majors has helped me a lot," said Banthia, who shot to prominence after winning the Road to Wimbledon and then the UK's Under-14 national championship.

"This championship will test me physically. Today the biggest plus was my serve. I did not lose many points on my serve. He has a single-handed backhand and that can't hurt me. The key is self-belief and I have that coming into this tournament," he said.

The self belief was evident when Banthia said he is sure of winning the Under-18 doubles title and that's why he has entered three events this year.

"I am hungry for titles. I won's miss one, if there is one for taking," said the Pune boy who is top seed in the Under-18 championship and has moved to the quarterfinals with a 6-2 6-3 win over Delhi's Rohan Mehra.

However, other promising juniors such as Dakshineshwar Suresh and Ajay Malik did not have luck to move to the next round in men's singles. The tall Chennai player lost 3-6 2-6 to former champion and eighth seed Mohit Mayur Jayaprakash, who whacked the ball around.

Malik lost 3-6 6-3 4-6 to Anshu Bhuyan. But moving to the next round was third seed Siddharth Rawat, who got the better of Kaza Vinayak Sharma 6-4 7-5 in a tough battle.

Fifth seed Nitin Kumar Sinha beat Dhruv Sunish 6-3,6-1 while VM Ranjeet got the better of S Prithvi 6-1 6-3.

In women's singles, fifth seed Humera Shaikh battled past Prathiba P Narayan (KA) 7-6 (6) 0-6 6-3 to progress to the second round while sixrth seed Ramya Natrajan ousted Prathyusha Rachap 6-3 6-1.

Lockl girl Shweta Rana beat Ayushi Tanwar 6-1, 6-4 and Sathwika Sama easily got past Vanshita Pathania 6-1,6-1.

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