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October
Sushant Chiba won his first tournament in nearly a year, defeating Molyneaux 6-3, 6-7(5), 7-6(3) to take the China Open(500). That should go a long way towards cementing him for the WTF. It'll take a strong performance at the Shanghai Masters this week to keep him in contact with those above him though, as he was a finalist last year. Japan was won by Isa Solheim, who moves up to career-best 4th. We'll see if that lasts … I have my doubts.
Amrik Kasaravalli took several weeks in a row off to train. While the top players are dueling in the final hardcourt masters of the year, he's beginning the big year-end Challenger push. For the next seven weeks he'll be playing more often than not, hoping to close the points gap and get closer to the Top 32. How well he does in this stretch will determine how much more remains to be done next year.
Nasir Chittoor won both singles and, more narrowly, doubles in a FT3 event in the Ukraine a couple of weeks back. Last week's practice wasn't stellar, so if that continues he'll be back on the court sooner than later and moving up to the FT2 level. Satyagit Guha lost in the second qualifying round in that event, but the doubles title moved both players into the Top 1000 in the pairs competition. They're looking good enough now that, over the course of the coming months, I expect them to move up enough to be Sri Lanka's standard bearers for doubles in the WTC. Right now they are 6th and 7th nationally, but there's nobody ranked within the Top 300 in doubles and only two better than 500th. Continued futures success would make that happen probably by the end of group play next season.
3rd-7th are separated by just 440 points going into Shanghai. Of course those players have varying amounts of points to defend, but there's quite a bit of potential for another shakeup. And afterwards I'll take another look at the Race as well.
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