Defeat for Sharan-Sitak and Balaji-Vardhan

Divij Sharan's maiden appearance at an ATP Masters tournament ended with a second round defeat as he and his partner Artem Sitak lost in straight sets to third seeds Marcelo Melo and Luksz Kubot in Shanghai on Wednesday.

Sharan and his Kiwi partner lost 3-6 4-6 to the Brazilian-Polish combination, ranked sixth in the world.

With this defeat, no Indian is left in the doubles draw as Rohan Bopanna had crashed in the first round with his French partner Edouard Roger-Vasselin.

They had lost 6-7 (3) 4-6 to Ben Mclachlan and Jan-Lennard Struff.

"We lost serve once in the first set. Lost serve twice in the second, both on deuce. Broke them once in the second on deuce and they held another game on deuce. So it was a close match. Would have liked to convert some of those points and the result could have been different. Still happy to get a chance to play in my first ATP 1000," said Sharan, who will be playing in Antwerp next.

Meanwhile, at the Tashkent Challenger in Uzbekistan, the top seeded Indian pair of Vishnu Vardhan and N Sriram Balaji suffered a shock defeat against local wild card pair of Sanjar Fayziev and Jurabek Karimov in the quarterfinals.

At one stage they were serving for the opening set at 5-4 but went on to lose to the local pair 6-7(4) 6-7(3) in one hour and 43 minutes.