Sri Lanka beat Lebanon

Anuradha Abeysekera

Sri Lankan tennis players lived up to the expectations in the Davis Cup Asia/Oceania Zone III tournament and got promoted to the group II. The tournament concluded yesterday at the Sri lanka Tennis Association courts when the local team registered their last victory against strong Lebanon team. As both teams were already selected to the group II, the last tie between the two countries did not display a good competition.

Sri Lanka maintained a flawless record and were unbeaten in the tournament. For the first time in the country’s Davis Cup history, Sri Lanka got promoted to the group II while being the host country.

Oshada Wijemanne’s opponent Giuranni Samaha (Lebanon) did not show much competitiveness from the beginning and got retired in the first set when the score was 5-2, gifting the victory to Sri Lanka in the first single match. Harshana Godamanne found no difficulty to beat his Lebanese rival Karim Alayli as he won the second singles match in straight sets 6-1,6-0.

In the doubles match, Lebanese duo Chukri Patrick and Samawa Jiovanni did not want to continue the match, offered a walk-over to Oshada Wijemanne and Rajeev Rajapakse just after the match started.

Sri Lanka received green light to the group II after they downed Malaysia on Saturday in a 2-1 win.

Even though local pair, Rajeev Rajapaksha and T Dineshkanthan lost the doubles match to Si Yew and A Deedat (Malaysia) 4-6, 2-6, Oshada and Harshana did well to win the two singles in straight sets. Oshada beat Si Yew Ming (Malaysia) 6-4 7-5 in the first singles while Harshana defeated Ariez Elyaas (Malaysia) 6-1 6-2 in the second.

The best performed two countries in the tournament, Sri lanka and Lebanon will play in the group II next year while the least two performed nations, United Arab Emirates and Myanmar were demoted to Group IV. The other three countries, Vietnam, Malaysia and Kuwait will remain in group III.