by Suman Gupta
Mumbai, November 10: International Tennis returns to the MSLTA (Maharashtra State Lawn Tennis Association) tennis complex, with the $25000 Men’s ITF Tennis Championships, which gets underway on the newly laid courts of the MSLTA, from November 12, 2022. This event marks the beginning of a busy season at MSLTA which will be hosting a series of competitions till March 2023.
Sunder Iyer, the Hon Secretary, MSLTA and the Tournament Director of the Men’s ITF Championship, informed that Men’s tennis players from 17 countries will be seen in action at the event, which is being held in Mumbai after a gap of nearly eight years. “We (MSLTA) has been organizing men’s, women’s, and junior internationals across the state, but we had not organised an international Men’s event in Mumbai for almost eight years and we wanted to come back with a bigger event and we are happy to organise a $25000 event which will give an opportunity to Indian players to earn substantial prize-money and collect valuable ATP Points.
Elaborating further, Iyer pointed out that this tournament will herald a beginning of a season which will see MSLTA host, Gadre Marine ITF Gadre 3 Juniors at Pune, EMMTC -MSLTA Under 14 Nationals at Aurangabad , two $25000 ITF women’s events at Solapur and Navi Mumbai, followed by the Premier Tennis League at Pune. The biggest ATP event in South East Asia the TATA Open Maharashtra ATP Championships will be organised at the Mhalunge Balewadi Tennis Stadium from December 31 to January 7, 2023.
An ITF $40000 Women’s ITF the first event initiated by the ITF will be held at the Deccan Gymkhana, followed by an 100K ATP Challenger event at Pune in February 2023. MSLTA is hosting events worth over $200000 (Rs 1.6 Crores) apart from the Tata Open Maharashtra.
“We are able to host these events only because of the support and contributions of the Sports Authority of India, AITA, ITF and ATP and we (MSLTA) would like to thank all of them,” Iyer mentioned.
“We are hoping that players from Maharashtra and India can try to improve their rankings by giving it their best shot and do well in the upcoming events, which are being conducted by MSLTA through their affiliates across the state. By taking these events across the state we are able to showcase our strong infrastructure in other cities apart from Mumbai and Pune,” Iyer added.
Oliver Crawford of USA ranked 358 will head the ranking list in the Main Draw, followed by Israel’s Ben Pateel , Czech Republic’s Dominik Palan, Ukrainians Orlov Vladyslav, Eric Vanshelboim, Slovakia’s Lukas Pokorny, German Tom Gentzsch, Serbian Boris Butulija, Chilean Bastian Malla. The Indian players who have made the Main draw include Manish Sureshkumar, Sidharth Rawat, Digvijay Pratap Singh, Niki Kaliyanda Poonacha, Ishaque Eqbal, Rishab Agarwal and Adil Kalyanpur.
The qualifying round will be played on November 13 and 14 and the main draw will commence from November 15 to 20. Nitin Kannamwar has been appointed as the ITF Supervisor of the event.
