Spain and other favorites did not make it to the Davis Cup final

The final part of the Davis Cup, which will be held in Malaga at the end of November, will take place without the participation of the hosts – the tennis players of Spain, as well as several other repeated winners of this tournament – the national teams of the USA, France and Croatia. This turned out to be the results of the group stage of the Davis Cup Finals, which the current holders of the honorary trophy, the Canadians and the Finns, the main troublemakers of the current draw, overcame surprisingly easily.

The first half of the Davis Cup final, the group stage, in which 16 teams were divided into four quartets, brought a number of sensational results. The most important of them was the failure of the Spanish team: in Valencia it could not even take second place, behind the Czechs and Serbs and ahead only of the South Korean team. In the absence of world number one Carlos Alcaraz, who took a break after losing in the US Open semi-finals to Daniil Medvedev, the six-time tournament winners did not have the resources to secure their way out of the group. First, the Spaniards lost to the Czech team, and the second round match with the Serbs was decisive for them. Five days after defeating the same Medvedev in the US Open final, 36-year-old Novak Djokovic took part in it, who flew in from Belgrade and left no chance for Alejandro Davidovich Fokina.

Thus, the quarter-finals, semi-finals and final of the Davis Cup Finals, which will be held on November 21-26 in Malaga, were left without a tournament host, which will certainly affect attendance. Back in January, it became known about the early termination of the contract between the International Tennis Federation (ITF) and the company Kosmos, which belongs to the former famous Spanish football player Gerard Pique and was the operator of the Davis Cup for the previous four seasons. The reason for this ITF decision was the failure of Kosmos to comply with the financial terms of the contract due to serious losses. The company’s revenues from 2019 to 2022 were too far behind its expenses: they amounted to no more than €20 million, that is, only a third of the money it spent on holding the tournament.

The results of the tournament in Group D in Croatian Split were extremely unexpected. There, the Croats, weakened by injuries to several of their strong players, and the Americans, who had at their disposal two tennis players from the top twenty – Francis Tiafoe and Tommy Paul, as well as Austin Krajicek and Rajiv Ram, respectively the first and fifth rackets of the world in doubles, were able to win only one victory at a time. The Dutch and the Finnish team advanced to the playoffs, which turned out to be even higher than them in terms of additional indicators after a crushing victory in the final round over the US team – 3:0. In singles, the Finns’ success was brought to them by relatively young tennis players – middle player in the top hundred Emil Ruusuvuori and outside of it Otto Virtanen, and in pairs the leading role was played by the newly minted winner of the US Open in mixed doubles, 34-year-old veteran Harri Heliovaara.

In Manchester, in a very evenly composed Group B, the teams of Great Britain and Australia knocked out the French and Swiss from the tournament. However, the fiasco of the French team, a ten-time Davis Cup winner, is not the biggest surprise these days. Since the tournament formula was seriously changed in 2019, the French have never even reached the quarterfinals. In Bologna, where the Group A matches took place, the current holders of the honorary trophy, the Canadians and the Italian team, were ahead of the Chileans and Swedes. True, if we consider that the Canadian team actually won three victories over its rivals with a backup squad, being left without former top-ten players in the world rankings Felix Auger-Aliassime and Denis Shapovalov, its success to some extent can also be considered a surprise.

The draw for the quarter-final stage will take place today in London. Moreover, it is already known that, according to the tournament formula, Canadians and Czechs can play with Australians or Finns, and Italians and Serbs can play with the Dutch or British. Russian tennis players, who won the Davis Cup in 2021, were suspended from all team competitions by decision of the ITF after the outbreak of events in Ukraine last year.

Evgeniy Fedyakov