The Indian pair of Harsh Mankad and Vishal Uppal claimed the doubles honours while Austrian Zbynek Mlynarik lifted the singles title in the ITF Men’s Futures Tennis tournament here today.The doubles final, an all Indian affair, saw Mankad and Uppal humble the fourth seeded combination of Vijay Kannan and Ajay Ramaswamy 6-1, 6-4 at the BTA tennis complex.Mlynarik gave an awesome demonstration of powerful ground strokes and serves to win his second Futures title in a week prevailing over Marcel Felder of Uruguay 6-3, 6-4 in the final. He gained 18 ITF points and a prize money of $1,950, while Felder had to contend with $1350 and 12 ITF points.Mlynarik, who had won the Mumbai leg of the Futures last week by outclassing Rohan Bopanna in the final, broke his opponent in the first and fifth games, but the Uruguyan broke back in the sixth.The Austrian kept up the momentum in the second set to open up a 5-2 lead, but at that point Felder raised his game by several notches and broke Mlynarik in the ninth to reduce the margin to 4-5. But serving to level the score and save the match, Felder suddenly became a bundle of nerves and committed two double faults to concede the set 4-6 and surrender the match after a 83-minute fight.The doubles final saw its first break in the fourth game when Kannan dropped his serve as Mankad-Uppal raced to a 4-1 lead by taking the fifth game.The sixth game saw a marathon battle as 20 points were played on Ramaswamy’s serve. Ramaswamy saved six break points before succumbing. Mankad and Uppal conceded the first two points on the former’s serve in the next game to trail 0-30, but then took the next four points to seal the opening set.The Mankad-Uppal duo then cruised to a comfortable 6-4 victory in the second set to clinch the title.
