My brother and I went to the Chennai Open 2008 last evening (the stadium is just a kilometre or two from where I live) to see a couple of second round matches.

The first match involved World No. 2 Rafael Nadal and was the big draw of the evening. Nadal, of course completely outclassed his opponent Rajeev Ram (USA) in a couple of easy sets. The other match on Centre Court involved Robin Haase, the highest ranked player from Netherlands. Needless to say I took my camera along and took some good shots. I thought I'd share a couple of them (original resolution 1600x1200 scaled down for conserving bandwidth).

Here's a picture from the first match:

And one from the match between Robin Haase and Lovro Zovko (a Croatian player). Robin Haase won the match in a couple of sets too, but the second one was closely fought (result: 7-5 in favour of Haase).

(snap credit: my brother, Ramshankar)

All evening there was a slight drizzle on and off which kept threatening play, but just as the second match got completed the rain really began pouring down heavily, so we were lucky to get to watch two full games.

Afterwards, I managed to get close to Robin Haase just before he left the stadium and took this snap before he got into his car:

This point was Nadal saving a break point (in the second set I think):

URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfozgKKnOv0

It's not often that we get to see international quality tennis played in India, so I enjoyed every bit of it. At least I won't regret having missed seeing Rafael Nadal in person when he was playing in a court in my neighbourhood.