India's top six tennis players, including Prakash Amritraj and Harsh Mankad, plus two wild cards, will take part in the two-day USD 15,000 prize money ABN Amro Tennis Challenge in Mumbai at the Cricket Club of India on December 10 and 11.
The winner of the eight-player knock-out event would get a wild card to the ATP tour's longest running sponsored event - the 32nd ABN Amro World Tennis Tournament - to be held indoors at Rotterdam in The Netherlands in February 2005.
The Rotterdam event's tournament director and former Wimbledon men's singles champion Richard Krajicek said that when the organisers - who hold a similar event for Dutch youngsters - thought of expanding it, India was their chosen country to extend the courtesy.
"This is the first year and the success of this event will be reviewed before deciding whether we can continue this
next year. I love to support tennis everywhere and we thought India is a good place to do so," the 1996 Wimbledon men's champion said.
As per the ATP rankings top six players who will take part in the event in Mumbai are: Prakash Amritraj, Harsh
Mankad, Sunil Kumar Sipaeya, Vinod Sridhar, Vijay Kannan and Vishal Uppal.
India' top junior Karan Rastogi has earned a wild card to be the seventh player in the fray and one more wild card recipient, to be decided by the All India Tennis Association at the end of the ongoing satellite circuit, will join the rest in the draw.
The ABN Amro World Tennis Tournament is one of the world's biggest tennis tournaments and is part of the exclusive group of 11 International Series Gold tournaments on the ATP Circuit. Past winners of this tournament include players such as Arthur Ashe, Jimmy Connors, Boris Becker, Richar Krajicek and Lleyton Hewitt. World No.1 Roger Federer has already confirmed his participation for the 2005 event.
