Anirudh Chandrasekar and Takeru Yuzuki made their Roland Garros debut count in every way, but the scoreline just evaded them. The pair took Paul and Willis to three sets, won the second in a tiebreak, and had the upper hand at 2-0 in the super tiebreak before the match slipped away: 3-6 7-6(4) 6-7(3-10).
The first set belonged to Paul and Willis, who were the more settled pair early on and took it 6-3 without too much resistance from the Indo-Japanese combination still finding their footing on the occasion. The second set was a different story. Yuzuki had a difficult time on serve, uncharacteristic for a player with his serving pedigree, but the pair scrapped their way through it regardless, eventually taking it in a tiebreak 7-6(4) to level the match and shift the momentum.
The third set saw Chandrasekar and Yuzuki dig in further. They dropped serve but broke back to stay in it, forcing a super tiebreak that, for a brief moment, looked like it might go their way. They opened 2-0. Then came nine consecutive points for Paul and Willis. The pair never recovered, going down 3-10 to exit the tournament.
The Paris heat added another layer of difficulty to the match. Yuzuki was battling the conditions as much as the opposition, and the mental load of competing under a blazing midday sun on a Grand Slam debut is not to be underestimated. That they pushed the match to a super tiebreak regardless, speaks to the resilience both players showed across three sets.
For Chandrasekar, it is a second experience of losing a match in these tiebreak circumstances at a Grand Slam – painful, but familiar enough to extract something from. For Yuzuki, it was a debut that showed his quality even on a difficult day.