Ritwik, Saurav bow out

Indian challenge ended early with Ritwik Bhattacharya and Saurav Ghosal crashing out of the third World doubles squash championships in Melbourne on Tuesday.

Ritwik and Saurav went down 9-3, 9-6, 9-7 to Campbell Grayson and Martin Knight of New Zealand in their third and last round-robin league match on the second day of the competition.

The Indians, who were the silver medallists in the 2004 edition, finished at the bottom of their pool C with one win and two losses to be left out of contention for a quarterfinal berth.

Only the top two teams in a pool advance to the last eight matches to be played tomorrow.

Ritwik, seeded third, and Saurav (4th) began their campaign with a hard-fought victory over unseeded Australians Craig Rowland and Bradley Freeme in their Pool C encounter. They prevailed 9-2, 11-13, 9-3, 8-10, 9-5.

The Indian duo, who were one of the fancied combinations this time around too, did not click as a team and failed to capitalise on the good start.

They had lost their second match to another home pair Paul Price (5th) and Timothy Manning (8th) with the score 9-4, 9-6, 5-9, 9-6 in the Aussies' favour.

Grayson and Knight went through by virtue of their all-win record. The other three pairs all had one victory and two defeats. But Price and Manning qualified for the next round on the back of their superior game difference of -1 (six games won and seven lost).

Rowland and Freeme came third in the group with a game difference of -2 while the Indians were last with -4.