Indian tennis player Sumit Nagal won the Tampere Open in Finland on Sunday to claim his second ATP Challenger Tour title this season.
The 25-year-old from Jhajjar beat fifth seed Dalibor Svrcina 6-4, 7-5 of the Czech Republic in the final, to add to the Challenger title he won in Rome in April.
In a match where the momentum kept changing, Nagal managed to break Svrcina’s serve five times as opposed to the three times his own serve was broken.
The win earned him his fourth Challenger title in his career.
Nagal started off the event with a 6-4, 6-1 win over former world No 35 Jiri Vesely in the first round, before beating Brazil’s Joao Lucas Reis Da Silva 6-3, 6-7(2), 7-6(4) in the second round.
Also read: Sumit Nagal – ‘One side of brain was saying slide, other side was saying I’m scared’
In the quarter-final, he scored a 6-3, 6-3 win over Tunisia’s Aziz Dougaz and then in the semi-final, he beat Spain’s Daniel Rincon 4-6, 6-3, 6-2 to make it to the final.
The 2023 season marked a return to the tennis tour for Nagal as he had spent most of the past few years on the sidelines due to injury.
He had slipped as far down as 638 in the world rankings last year, but has now managed to climb back up. His career best remains 122, which he achieved in August 2020.
After the win in Finland, he’s now mobed up to the world No 178 spot from the 231 rank he occupied last week.
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