Kolkata: Twenty-three-year-old Ramkumar Ramanathan would begin the second edition of the Premjit Lall Invitational 2017 as the top seeded player, as announced at the Calcutta Sports Journalist’s Club on Monday.
Sriram Balaji would enter the competition as the second seeded player, confirmed Abhishek Mukherjee, the tournament referee.
“There’ll be two seeds in singles and two seeds in doubles. The seed rankings will be taken on ATP points on the 8th of December. So we will wait till 11th to take this ranking from ATP to make the seedings. At present the number one seed will be Ramkumar, and number two seed will be Sriram Balaji. So this is the present ranking for the players,” said Mukherjee.
Speaking on the teams in the doubles event, he said, “Sriram Balaji would play with Vishnu Vardhan, Jeevan would play with Vijay Sundar Prasanth, Ramkumar is playing with Sasi Kumar Mukund and Saketh Myneni is playing with Siddharth Rawat.”
The competition is going to be held in a knockout format where there would be four teams in the doubles event and eight players battling it out in the singles.
“On 14th, we will have the singles quarter-finals. Next day, we will have the singles semi-final and doubles semi-final. On 16th, we would play the singles final in the morning followed by the doubles final,” Mukherjee, who has officiated various ATP tournaments, said.
Organised by the Jaidip Mukerjea Tennis Academy, this tournament was a grand success in it’s very first year. This year, it would be held from December 14-17 followed by a Pro-Celeb event.
Jaidip Mukerjea, one of the living legends of Indian tennis and the man behind this tournament, who was also Premjit’s doubles partner said, “We would also like to inform you that tennis maestro Vijay Amritraj would be coming on the 15th, staying with us for a couple of days and spend his valuable time with us. He was very close to Premjit. In fact Premjit was his captain in Davis Cup.”
“Sania Mirza would also be coming along with her father to pay respect,” the 1966 Arjuna awardee further added.
“We just got a confirmation that Somdev Dev Barman is coming and he is going to be happy to play the Pro-Celebs,” said Sharmin Mukerjea, the Tournament Director.