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Sri Lanka Rankings Update
Anil Mehul -- 2nd singles(unchanged). Mehul has narrowed the gap to just under 3k points with Iglar, and pulled away from Benda somewhat. At this point his goal is just to keep the good times rollin' as long as he can, having just turned 29 but certainly playing like a guy a couple years younger. He had a disappointing clay season last year until reaching the final at RG, and will hope for my consistency on the dirt.
Girish Girsh -- 4th singles(unchanged), 612th to 606th doubles. Girsh should be the second-best player in the world but appears to be slumping again -- Mehul is still the better player despite being past his prime, and the label of 'underachiever' is pretty much accurate here to a degree. Unless he steps it up again like he did at the end of last year, all he'll be able to do is wait for the players above him to enter more serious aging decline.
Prakash Mooljee -- 72nd to 52nd singles, 617th to 564th doubles. Mooljee is starting to see a hair more success as a doubles player lately, and his last pair to tier-2 challengers wins have boosted his ranking to a career-high. Knocking on the door of the Top 50 now, he's become the #3 player in the Sri Lankan ranks in both singles and doubles. It's going to hard to push significantly higher though, since other than a couple of early-round losses during the RG timeframe last year he's basically just replacing low-level challenger titles from the previous season. In the summer when the challenger circuit hits it's peak, he'll need to take on the top tier of players in the 30-45 range and win some of the bigger challenger events. Time will tell whether he's more ready for that or not as compared to the start of the year.
Shreya Ujjaval -- 52nd to 64th singles, 125th to 157th doubles. On paper it looks like Ujjaval is having a bad year. He hasn't actually gotten worse -- in fact, he's still objectively better than Mooljee despite what the rankings say(9.0 as compared to 8.92), though it's getting quite close. Incidentally, they played three times in practice this current week and Ujjaval won convincingly each time. He has passed his physical peak at this point while Mooljee won't for probably about a year, so it's just sort of a premature switch. The main problem Ujjaval is running into right now though is that he's stopped playing challengers in favor of the bigger events, about a year before he should have in my opinion. He's not embarassed himself by any stretch, but hasn't been able to get deep enough in the tournaments he's played to replace the points he's losing.
Shyam Senepathy -- 240th singles. The criminally overplayed Senepathy is nonetheless climbing through the ranks to a degree. Despite being poorly handled, he could make the Top 100 someday. Talent alone will ensure he has a career to some degree -- but it's too late for him to ever really become an elite performer.
Ritwik Suksma -- NR to 1139th juniors. Suksma has been picked up by competent hands, and is struggling his way through having won his first singles match in Trnava a few weeks ago. He has the ability to be very good though not great in time -- we'll see what he manages to achieve.
Ritwik Dudwadkar -- NR to 1227th juniors. Also just at the beginning of his journey, Dudwadkar is winless so far in singles and still trying to find his stride.
Manager Ranking -- 2nd(unchanged), 33.0k to 33.6k points. Slipped to third for a couple of weeks but generally have stayed just ahead of Hayato -- less than 200 points ahead as of this writing. Both of us are narrowing -- at a snail's pace -- the massive gap to oprice.
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