Top seed Karan Rastogi felt the heat, quite literally, against an unrelenting Aditya Madkekar before securing a hard-fought 6-4, 2-6, 6-1 win to enter the quarterfinals of the ITF Futures Men’s Tennis Tournament here on Wednesday.
Karan’s new-found nemesis and fifth seed Prakash Amritraj continued his fine form, outplaying qualifier Gursharan Singh 6-3, 6-1 to set up a quarterfinal clash against Chinese Taipei’s Hsin-Han Lee, who defeated Ashutosh Singh 6-3, 7-6 (4).
In the marathon match against Aditya, lasting more than two and a half hours, Karan had his back against the wall most of the time in the first two sets and just about managed to come through as his opponent seemed to have given up towards the end.
The top seed played out a rather scrappy game with his serve being the weakest link. He was broken in the very first game and was trailing 1-2 before managing to break back — courtesy an unforced error committed by his opponent.
Aditya had his share of chances but failed to convert them much to Karan’s relief, who got another lucky break in the eighth game, when Aditya mishit a forehand.
Karan was broken again in the ninth game but leading 5-4, he took the opener after Aditya committed another unforced error. Having lost the first set rather closely, Aditya came back strongly in the second set breaking Karan thrice in a row. Serving for the set, Aditya came level with a well-executed lob leaving Karan to throw his racket in disgust.
With some close line calls going his way, it was Karan’s turn to stage a comeback in the decider and the Davis Cupper held serve besides breaking Aditya twice to seal the issue in his favour.
Karan will take on eighth seed Navdeep Singh in the quarterfinals. Navdeep beat wildcard Tushar Liberhan 6-0, 6-2 in the second round.

Upset win
In another exciting second-round match, Sanam Singh upset Britain’s Robert Searle 6-3, 6-4. The 19-year-old Chandigarh-lad was swift on the baseline and his fierce forehand returns forced Robert to make errors. A frustrated Robert, who is placed over 100 places above the Indian in rankings, was left swearing at his racket as Sanam emerged on top after dominating the match.
He will now be up against fourth seed Sunil Kumar Sipaeya, who beat qualifier Rohan Gujjar 6-1, 6-4.
In the other second-round matches, Vishnu Vardhan upset Britain’s Matthew Smith 6-4, 6-1 to enter the last-eight stage, where he will take on Vinod Sridhar.
Vinod won against Chinese Taipei’s Tsung-Hua Yang 6-2, 6-4 in his second round match.