Pune: Sumit Nagal could have been forgiven if, deep inside, he had felt he didn’t want to play the first reverse singles rubber against Soonwoo Kwon.
1 had little time to fully recover for Saturday’s key clash. As it turned out, the 29-year-old went down 1-6, 2-6 in an hour and 18 minutes as Kwon powered South Korea to a 3-1 win over India in the Davis Cup Qualifier second-round tie in Seoul on Saturday (Sep 19, 2026). Korea became the first Asian nation, under the latest format of the men’s team tennis competition, to reach the World Group Final 8, to be played in Bologna, Italy, in November. The Indians won the doubles rubber first thing on Saturday morning, a 6-3, 3-6, 6-3 win over Uisung Park and JiSung Nam, but the key decision the captain did not make was replacing Nagal with the 18-year-old Manas Dhamne.
The Indian won just three points behind his first serve in the opening set and six in the second.
He just outplayed me, that’s it,” Nagal told reporters after the match. The rubber, and effectively the tie, was sealed within the first half-hour as Nagal was broken three times in the opening set, committing a double fault in each of those service games, two of them on break points. The second set was largely a formality, given Kwon’s rousing form and Nagal running on an empty tank. “I think more than mentally, it was physically. He played at a very high level. I was one level down, he was one level up. That made a big difference between me and him.
Having gone through a brutal three-hour, five-minute singles match on Friday evening, the India No.