Carlos Moya during his match against Juan Martin Del Potro in Mumbai on Tuesday. (AFP)

Mumbai: The line dividing the winner and a battling loser is often very thin. Rohan Bopanna got caught in that lakshmanrekha and thus missed out scalping a top-100 player on a pleasant Tuesday evening at the Kingfisher Airlines Open.

A little later, an 18-year-old Argentine grabbed his chances to bring Carlos Moya’s world crumbling down. Juan Marin del Potro, the youngest player in the top-150 of ATP rankings, humbled the fifth seed 6-3, 6-2 in 63 minutes.

A giant of a man at six-foot-five with a matching physique, Del Potro played rock-solid tennis to catch an error-prone Moya napping. “It was a real bad day for me… he played well but nothing special, I wasn’t just in the match,” said a disappointed Moya.

Eighth seed Wesley Moodie survived the Bopanna scare to win 3-6, 7-6 (7-5), 6-4 in a shade over two hours, but the Indian No. 1 can take away many positives from the first-round encounter. He constructed points cleverly from the backcourt, unleashed some superb passing shots off both flanks, served accurately throughout (15 aces and just one double-fault), made lesser mistakes than his much higher-ranked rival and stuck to his task like a good pro despite going a break down at the start of the final set.

What hurt the world No. 275 was Moodie’s flawless tennis in the second set tie-break and a silly service game first up in the decider.

The 73rd-ranked South African — who won the Wimbledon doubles title as well as his maiden singles crown in 2005 — was a picture of inconsistency. A compulsive serve-and-volleyer, he made too many errors at the net.

On a difficult day, Moodie’s serves stood by him and eventually got him through. He fired 19 aces, including four in the tie-break in which Bopanna didn’t have a whiff of an opening.

Bopanna’s opportunities came in the second set. He had three chances to break Moodie in the third game and one more in the fifth. The Indian Davis Cupper should have utilised at least one of those openings, when he got a tame second serve but misdirected his return.

It was exactly a year ago that Bopanna announced his second coming by giving Thomas Johansson, a former Grand Slam winner, a real run for his money in Davis Cup. The Indian went on to beat Frenchman Cyril Saulnier in January’s Chennai Open. On Tuesday, he looked a winner for a better part of the match, but that bottomline betrayed him.

“I can’t say I’m satisfied because I lost, but I didn’t play bad tennis,” was Bopanna’s comment at the post-match conference. Quite true, but isn’t it time you started winning these matches, Rohan?

Early on Day II, a pair of schoolboys discovered what men’s tennis was all about.

Wild cards Akash Wagh (16) and Christopher Marquis (15) — promising kids training at Mahesh Bhupathi’s Elite academy in Bangalore — were allowed 36 minutes under the sun by top seeds Bhupathi and Mario Ancic who dropped a solitary game en route to the quarter finals.

The mentor was ruthless on court. “The idea is to give them breaks at a young age which we didn’t get…none expected them to put up a great fight, let them just feel the pace at which modern tennis played,” said Bhupathi.