Roger Marshall and Philip Vandoninck pulled off the first major upset of the Argus Open tennis championships when the fourth seeded pair pulled back a double mini-break in the tournament?s Modified Scoring system to beat second seeds Samitha Ranaweera and Jacob Trott 6-2, 2-6 (10-8), at the WER Joell stadium.

It was a match that failed to live up to expectations with neither pairing at their best. The difference, as it turned out, came because Vandoninck was able to cover more consistently the mistakes of his partner while Ranaweera was unable to raise the level of his game to cover the shortcomings of Trott.

?It was just one of those games,? admitted Ranaweera when it was all over. ?I really felt that we were in with a chance, especially when we had that double mini-break at 6-3 in the pro-set, but they just proved to be better on the night, winning seven of the next nine points.?

Ranaweera, who appeared to be hitting his stride moving into the semi-finals, had a bad spill midway through the second set when he got caught in the net separating the courts, and for a while it was feared that he would be unable to continue.

Not only did he recover, but he and Trott levelled the match at a set apiece when they broke Marshall and Vandoninck on the way to a 6-2 victory to level the match at a set each. ?That first set just got away from us because we played all over the place.

?In the end they were just better than we were on the night.?

Marshall and Vandoninck started early when they broke Trott in the third game to level the match at 2-2 and it was all downhill for Trott and Ranaweera from then on.

Vandoninck recovered from his shellacking at the hands of Andy Bray in the second round, to play the dominant role in the victory.

Meanwhile Blenn Bean, the double handed newcomer to top level tennis, came from a set down to defeat Ron Ganzon 5-7, 6-3 (10-7) in Men?s B singles play while second seed Earl Leader had one break in each set on the way to a 6-4, 6-4 victory over Eugene Simmons.

Both top seeds who were in action during the night, Andy Bray and Sasha Fisher, and Lavern Stowe and Ashley Brooks comfortably won their matches. Stowe and Brooks beat Patricia Birch and Rhonda Caza 6-2, 6-1, while Bray and Fisher eased past Philip Cooper and Kietny Chrun 6-0, 6-2.

In one match that started out as if it would last the whole night through, Nick Frost and Arrigo Merlo came from a set down to beat Dennis Harris and Larry Samuels 4-6, 6-1 (10-2), while in the only other match played on the night, the pair of Romar Douglas and Paul Simons had a tougher than expected battle from the youthful pair of Charles Skater and Neil Towlson before coming through with a 6-4, 6-4 victory.