Jeevan and Prerna are National Hardcourt champions

The men's singles final was a close and high-quality match in which top seed Jeevan from Tamil Nadu won 7-6 (4) 6-1 against his wild card opponent from Maharashtra.

In contrast, the women's final was a dull affair with the the two Delhi players, who train under the same coach, putting up a drab show, which was not a good advertisement for the women tennis in the country.

Prerna was leading 2-6 7-6 (7) 4-1 when Rishika, who had squandered a championship point in the second-set tie-breaker, decided to concede the match due to fever.

In the men's singles, the two players fought tooth and nail in the opening set, not giving an inch to each other, but the second set belonged to Jeevan.

They served big, moved fast on the court and played some good rallies to make it an engrossing match.

Arjun saved two breakpoints in the fourth game of the match and stretched the issue to a tie-breaker.

A poor judgement near the baseline when he left a ball which he thought was out, proved disastrous for Arjun as his game fell apart from that point. That put him a breakpoint down in the third game.

Arjun hit a backhand to net to hand the 2-1 lead to Jeevan and could never recover from that. He could not hold his serve after that and Jeevan easily pocketed the match, Rs 1.5 lakh as prize money and a wild card to the main draw of the next month's ATP Challenger event here.

Prerna owed a thank you to Sania Mirza, who gave away the winners trophies, since it was on her suggestion that the organisers increased the prize money for women's winner from Rs 1 lakh to to 1.5 lakh, at par with men's prize money and runners-up now get Rs 1 lakh instead of Rs 65,000. MORE