Rohan Bopanna and Peter Clarke of Ireland stayed on course for a successive summit clash after registering contrasting victories in the quarter-finals of the ITF Satellite tennis tournament (third leg) in Gurgaon, on Thursday.
Top seed Bopanna was in command, thrashing qualifier Kamala Kannan 6-3, 6-2 while Clarke needed two hours and four minutes to beat J Vishnu Vardhan 6-4, 7-6 (7/4) to reach the last four.
Clarke, who defeated Bopanna in the last leg, could effect only one break of serve in the entire match against his tall Andhra Pradesh opponent and had great trouble in controlling the pace of the game in windy conditions at the National Tennis Academy.
The Irishman, however, hung on and used his big serves to his advantage to save the day for him and book a semi-final match-up with fifth seed Vinod Sridhar.
Sridhar, known for carrying his emotions on his sleeves, made sure that his erratic behaviour and mood swings did not affect the end result against third seed Prima Simpatiaji of Indonesia.
The left-hander from Chennai controlled his outburst in time and paced himself up well to beat the Indonesian 6-4, 4-6, 6-1 to move to the last four.
But the match of the day turned out to be the one between two qualifiers -- Nitin Kirtane and the United States' Nima Roshan, which the former won 6-2, 3-6, 7-6 (7/5).
Both the players took some time to settle down and, in fact, neither could hold on to serve till
Kirtane broke the pattern in the sixth game of the first set and then went on to take the lead.
Roshan, who looked lackluster for the entire first set, then changed tactics and began coming hard at his 31-year-old opponent.
The move immediately paid off as the American first saved two break-points in the opening game of the second set to hold serve for the first time of the match and immediately raced to a 3-0 lead.
Though both the players exchanged breaks in the sixth and seventh games, Roshan had little trouble in pocketing the set.
In the decider neither was prepared to concede any ground and played on serve till 4-4.
Roshan was the first to get any kind of an advantage when he broke Kirtane in the ninth game but nerves got the better of him as he lost serve in the very next game while serving for the match.
Kirtane then used all his experience in the tie break and though Roshan was able to save as many as three match points he finally went down in two hours and 35 minutes.
Bopanna also made it to the doubles final when he teamed up with Vijay Kannan to beat the Japanese pair of Hayato Furukawa and Tetsuhiro Yamamoto 6-3, 6-4.
The top seeds will now take on second seeds Jaco Mathews and Ashutosh Singh, who defeated Yew Ming Si of Malaysia and Simpatiaji 7-5, 7-6 (9/7).
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