Tara Iyer and Ankita Bhambri stayed on course for a repeat final after scoring contrasting wins in the quarterfinals of the $10,000 ITF women’s tennis event at the DLTA Complex here on Thursday.
Tara, the third seed and aiming for a hat-trick of titles, had to sweat it out to book her semifinal berth with a hard-fought 6-3, 4-6, 6-3 quarterfinal win against Varatchaya Wongteanchai of Thailand in two hours and 16 minutes.
However, there was no such struggle for Ankita, runner-up to Tara at Noida last week, as she cruised to a 6-2, 6-1 win against Isha Lakhani in another quarterfinal.
Meanwhile, top seed Rushmi Chakravarthy tumbled out with a 6-2, 6-1 loss to Korean Kyung-Yee Chae in exactly an hour.
The Hyderabad-born teenager went up 4-2 when Wongteanchai dropped her serve in the sixth game with a double fault.
Tara then had a poor second set in which her shots kept misfiring. She was broken in the fourth game, and although she levelled the scores in the seventh, her Thai rival once again broke her in the 10th to take the set.
In the decider, both the girls played aggressive tennis. Tara came through with breaks in the first and seventh games.
Next up for Tara is another Thai girl, Nungnadda Wannasuk, who got a walkover from second seed Montinee Tangphong, also of Thailand.
Isha imploded in a heap of double-faults, as many as seven of them, against Ankita, who will take on Chae in the other semifinal.