N. Sriram Balaji and his Brazilian partner Marcelo Demoliner suffered a first-round exit at the 2026 Wimbledon Championships in London on Thursday.

The Indo-Brazilian duo lost 6-3, 6-7, 4-6 to the Belgian-Dutch pair of Sander Gillé and Sem Verbeek in a marathon two-hour match.

This was the second meeting between the two pairs, with Balaji and Demoliner holding a 1-0 head-to-head advantage before the match.

Balaji opened the match with a confident service game, giving the Indo-Brazilian pair a positive start. The duo also looked solid from the baseline, producing some effective returns.

They earned the first break of the match in the eighth game after Verbeek failed to hold serve despite saving an earlier break point.

The Indo-Brazilian pair maintained their advantage to take the opening set before the second set went into a tiebreak, with both teams holding serve throughout.

Gillé and Verbeek found their opening in the tiebreak, forcing Balaji and Demoliner into a series of errors to claim the set and force a decider.

The momentum shifted in favour of the Belgian-Dutch pair in the final set as Balaji was broken for the first time in the match, failing to win a single point on his opening service game of the decider.

Gillé and Verbeek capitalised on the early break, maintained control of the contest, and closed out the match by taking the final set 6-4.

Later in the day, Yuki Bhambri and Anirudh Chandrasekar also faced a first-round exit with their respective partners, ending India’s campaign in men’s doubles.

Anirudh and his partner, Japanese Takeru Yuzuki, went down 4-6, 7-6, 6-7, to Ignacio Buse and Marco Trungelliti in a match that was decided by a super tiebreak.

Meanwhile, Yuki and Michael Venus of New Zealand faced a straight-set 3-6, 4-6 defeat to the Dutch-American pair of Jean-Julien Rojer and Theodore Winegar in just an hour and 8 minutes.