Won the battle, lost the war.

Ok, I lost - as expected.

For a while in the first set, it appeared as though he would blank me out .. and totally embarass me in the process.

but then ..
I put my head down and focussed ..
and..........

I won a game. I felt a bit like how Ajit Agarkar would probably have felt when he scored his first run after his run of seven consecutive ducks in Australia. :-)

So the first set was gone 6-1 in something like 20 mins.

But the second set was far more interesting - after losing serve in the very first game and falling behind 2-0, I broke serve and took a 3-2 lead. I maintained that one-game advantage throughout .. there were some exciting rallies .. it went to a tiebreak .. I even had a setpoint .. but I lost eventually 9-7 on the tiebreak. The second set was atleast an hour long.

So it turned out to be much closer than I had anticipated .. 1-6, 6-7 (7-9).

In the first set, I played from the baseline, and it didn't work very well, to say the least. In the second set, I came to the net more, mixed up my shots and used drop shots to good effect .. but my opponent clearly did not like that. In fact, after I played a winning drop shot on one of the points, he served underarm on the next one (taking a leaf out of Martina Hingis' book, perhaps) .. almost as if he wanted to express his displeasure. I managed to hit a return winner on that - small consolation for me, since I ended up losing the match.

But I am at peace with the result .. would have been nice to win a set, but a tiebreak against #1 isn't a bad result.