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Paes crashes out

The lone Indian challenge in the men's singles at the Australian Open ended today with Leander Paes losing his second round match to Andreas Vinciguerra, 7-6(3), 6-4, 6-3.

Paes got a first hand experience of what the eleven top-100 players have known in the last few months - that the 18-year old Swede is something special and not easy to beat.

In what appeared to be a good match where the Indian seemed determined to fight till the end, Paes started well in the first set, holding his serve at love including an ace in the first game. With some good serving and three winners on net approaches, he forced a break chance in the sixth game and went up 4-2. He served the next game at love, with four aces, to got up 5-2. Vinciguerra, who was not holding his serve comfortably, then got his act together and broke Paes in the in the ninth game. Thereafter the set went into the tie-breaker as both held serve.

In tie-breaker too both players held serves till 3-4 when Paes lost two points on serve, both at the net, before Vinciguerra could take the set at 6-7(3-7).

Paes, who had won 7 of 11 net approaches at the start of the set, went down to four of the next 13, which showed that Vinciguerra had got a good measure of Paes's game, and was beginning to pass him regularly to nullify his net-game.

In the second set, Paes served well at the beginning but ran into some trouble facing a break point at 30-40 in game 5 which he saved with two aces. He again faced a break point in game 8, but held again. It was clearly a question of Paes hitting his first serves and finishing the job at the net because Vinciguerra was not making a mistake anywhere with 13 winners and just one unforced error from him in the second set. It was a matter of time when the Indian would falter on a serve or miss a volley. And it did happen in the 10th game as Vinciguerra forced the break at 30-40 and finished it to take a two set lead.

Vinciguerra started the third set making a couple of unforced errors and Paes had two break points in game 3, but again the Swede saved them. Vinciguerra came back in the very next game with break chances at 15-40 and broke the Indian for the 3rd time in the match, at 30-40. Paes kept trying and did not fold, but it was now only a matter of time. It went with serve for four more games as Vinciguerra served off the final game at love to win the match.

Statistically, the match took an hour and 45 minutes. Each player fired 10 aces; there were four double faults by Paes to three by Vinciguerra; 35 winners by both; 39 unforced errors by Paes as compared to 10 by Vinciguerra. 33 points won out of 67 net approaches by Paes as compared to only 11 out of 15 by the Swede, who is basically a baseline player. Vinciguerra won 103 points as compared to 86 by the Indian. In the end it was the more unforced errors which made the difference for the Indian who otherwise played a good match.

Paes earned 50 points from the Australian Open, which will place him in the 115-120 range in the new ATP rankings.

In the mixed doubles, Leander will be playing with Lisa Raymond of USA and is seeded second behind Bjorkman/Kournikova.

Paes/Raymond are placed in the bottom half of the 32-team draw, the other seeded teams being fourth seed Tood Woodbridge/Arantxa S Vicario, fifth seed Mark Woodforde/Natasha Zvereva and seventh seed John-L. DeJager/Caroline Vis.

Paes/Raymond will face the unseeded pair of David Adams of South Africa and Kristie Boogert of The Netherlands.

In the upper half, the seeds are top seed Bjorkman/Kournikova, sixth seed Tarango/Likhovtseva, third seed Palmer/Stubbs and eighth seed Olhovskiy/Tatarkova.

The interesting pairs to watch are Leach/Amenda Koetzer and Tood Woodbridge/Arantxa S Vicario.

Lleyton Hewitt is playing with his sister Jaslyn Hewitt as a wild card entrant team. One more name who is playing after a long time is the great Yayuk Basuki of Indonesia. She retired from singles and doubles a year back, but is playing mixed doubles here with Daniel Orsanic. The Williams sisters, Mirjana Lucic, Justin Gimelstob, Max Mirnyi are some of the good mixed doubles players missing in this draw.

Paes, who is playing with his regular partner, will try to repeat the success of the Wimbledon mixed doubles final which he won against Bjorkman/Kournikova. Actually these two teams have the same sum-rank - Anna is the No 1 women's doubles player, with Jonas being No 5 in men's doubles while Paes is No 1 in the men's and Raymond No 5 in the women's.

The organiser must have tosses the coin to decided who would be the top seeds.