Defending Davis Cup champions, Switzerland, released their player line-up last week for their forthcoming first round tie versus Belgium. Neither Roger Federer nor Stanislas Wawrinka will play the tie this weekend, instead, Swiss players with rankings hovering in the three hundreds will attempt to take the team through to the next round. Meanwhile, Belgium boasts the likes of David Goffin, Rafael Nadal-conqueror Steve Darcis and handy singles player, Ruben Bemelmans.
Therefore, we face the very likely scenario that the defending Davis Cup champions will lose in the first round of the competition with neither of their best players interested in trying to recapture the title. What does this say about the state of the Davis Cup, if the defending champions field such a poor team in an attempt to defend their title?
Federer’s comments regarding his own non-involvement in the Davis Cup first round reveal an almost dismissive attitude to the competition. On whether it was a difficult decision to skip the first round, he said at a press conference in Dubai: ‘No, it wasn’t a difficult decision. I have played for so long, and I think by winning it I can finally do whatever I please, to be quite honest.’ He then went on to outline how ‘it’s been a big burden for me throughout my career’ and ‘there is so much guilt put on you from the Federation or from the ITF more so than anybody else.’
Something could have been lost in translation but this comes across as being unusually blunt from the normally diplomatic Federer. The Davis Cup seems to have been a cause for concern for Federer his entire career: ‘a big burden’ by his own description. Perhaps he was alluding to the fact that he had to constantly change his schedule to take part in the Davis Cup ties to save the Swiss from relegation from the World Group. Moreover, he has won over 50 matches for Switzerland which is a huge total for a team who rarely went far in the competition.
Can we regard Federer’s involvement last year as ticking off the career checklist? Although he emphasised that winning the Davis Cup was more for the team, ‘I totally did it for the boys more than for me,’ is it coincidental that Federer began to take the Davis Cup seriously once Wawrinka had won his Australian Open title, once the Swiss had a realistic chance of winning the Cup with two strong singles players? Did the ‘boys’ participate in the competition, or were they more like supporters? It’s difficult to tell because Federer isn’t self-serving and certainly his legacy was assured before the Swiss took the Davis Cup title.
Meanwhile, Wawrinka hasn’t said anything about his non-involvement in the Davis Cup. Clearly Indian Wells is much more important to him than bringing the Swiss team through to the next round. Even without Federer, Wawrinka could carry the team through as Federer did for long stretches of his career. In fact Federer said: ‘I hope that Stan is going to play, you know, next round or September or whatever it’s going to be to keep us in the World Group.’ Is it fair to savage Wawrinka for not playing? Indian Wells is a huge tournament and is widely considered to be one of the best run tournaments on tour with the backing of Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison. Why then, would Wawrinka jeopardise his chances in Indian Wells by playing the first round of a competition which they have already won?
And this is the crux of the issue: Davis Cup is a team-based competition which relies on individuals to compromise their own hopes for the season in order to try to win it. If we take the tie this weekend, what kind of person believes that the scheduling is sane? Many of the ties are being played in Europe whilst Indian Wells, in the USA, starts soon after, with men’s first round matches commencing on the 12th. How many top players are willing to compromise their hopes at Indian Wells to take their team through the first round of the Davis Cup?
This is where Federer’s comments about the ITF and the Swiss National Tennis Federation become much more interesting. The fact that they had to put guilt on him to play shows that Davis Cup is not at the forefront of the top players’ minds when they are trying to assemble their schedule and that only guilt-mongering will suffice in forcing players to play for their countries. The ITF have a vested interest in keeping the Davis Cup going, see as it is their competition and as such they have to have the backing of the top players.
Ultimately, Davis Cup is reliant upon top players committing to the competition to keep it relevant. As discussed earlier, the Davis Cup loses its merit if in one year you have a team packed out with the best players in the world who go on to win and then the next year the best players decide not to play and their team loses early. Perhaps it would be better to see the Davis Cup as a self-contained annual competition, each year separate from the other with no idea of a ‘defending champion’.
In any case, the facts are that neither Federer nor Wawrinka have seen fit to carry the Swiss team through their first round. Belgium will most likely defeat the Swiss and the defending champions will be out of the competition. The competition is not important enough to compel players to play and when this happens, what’s the point in running the competition? Serious questions need to be asked about Davis Cup and its place in the modern tennis game.
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