Davis Cup: India leads 2-0 against Pakistan on day 1

India leads 2-0 against Pakistan in the Davis Cup playoffs as Ramkumar Ramanathan defeated Pakistan's Aisam-Ul-Haq and Sriram Balaji beat Aqeel Khan, on Saturday.

Ramkumar Ramanathan gave India an early lead over Pakistan in the Davis Cup, World Group I, preliminary round match at the Pakistan Sports Complex, Islamabad on the grass court on Saturday.

Ramkumar defeated Pakistan's star player 43-year-old Aisam-Ul-Haq Qureshi in the first match of the tie and the former claimed a come from a behind win (7-6, 6-7, 6-0) to give a 1-0 lead to India.

The first set was going smoothly as both players were comfortably holding their serves one after and extended the set to the tiebreaker where Qureshi made two mini-breaks and won the tiebreaker 7-3 and went one set up in the match.

Ramkumar started the second game with a break in the first game but also gave a break back at 2-2 and took another tiebreaker in the match but this time he grabbed the opportunity and levelled the match after winning the tie-break 7-4.

He continued this momentum in the final set and scored a bagel (6-0) victory after his excellent serving and triple break.

The second match of the day was between N.Sriram Balaji and Aqeel Khan of Pakistan. Balaji is traditionally a doubles player, and here he played a singles match after two years. He started a little slowly in the match but quickly regained his rhythm.

He took the first game 7-5 after breaking Aqeel's final serve of the set and was aiming to quickly wrap up the game but the match got halted because of heavy rain and both the players left the field, waiting for the rain to stop.

Sriram Balaji defeated Aqeel in the second set 6-3 to assure that India have a 2-0 lead going into the second day.