Rob McLean - Lithuania should not be taken lightly
With the prospect of 'British tennis in crisis (again)' headlines on the horizon, we had an early taster of negative stories with Andy Murray angering sponsors and organisers in Dubai and the British player no one has heard of suing a national newspaper in the High Court.
Next weekend things could get a whole lot worse when we take on the might of, er, Lithuania in the Davis Cup.
I shouldn't mock, as Frankie Howard used to say, because they could well be taking the mickey out of us.
John Lloyd, the British Davis Cup captain, was named as one of the high profile figures who could have given evidence against Robert Dee, the player the article claimed was the ''the world's worst tennis pro'' and had lost 54 matches in a row on the lowest part of the tour.
On the subject of underachieving Brits, Lloyd has no peers but he has slightly more pressing matters on the indoor hard courts of Vilnius in the Baltic state.
Of course, there is no Andy Murray to call on and he let it slip that he wasn't too motivated for the recent Dubai event, this coming hard on the heels of pulling out of Marseille at short notice.
Murray's mistake was to admit ''it was not the end of the world'' to lose to Serb Janko Tipsarevic and for trying out new tactics.
Murray is in good company with this occasional approach to a match. In 2002, at the same event, Roger Federer appeared not to be trying against German Rainer Schuttler.
In Chris Bower's biography of the Swiss, he wrote that as a result of his slapdash performance the organisers threatened not to pay his appearance money, but eventually coughed up when he turned up the following year.
Some people might be accusing Murray of tanking - the practice of a player deliberately losing a match but giving the impression of trying to win it - but it is common practice on the tour and very hard to detect.
It happens more in the final event before Slams. Britain's No 1 will probably be delighted to be temporarily out of the Davis Cup scene. There are no easy games at international level is the old adage; in Davis Cup it should be rephrased to there are only difficult matches for GB.
On paper it looks like Lithuania, a country that has an annual budget for tennis of £100,000 compared to the Lawn Tennis Association's £40m, should have no chance.
Unfortunately the match is no foregone conclusion. Ricardas Berankis has recently become the first Lithuanian-born player to reach a quarter-final of an ATP event, in San Jose, an achievement that is still only a pipe dream at the moment for Dan Evans and James Ward, who will probably play the singles for GB.
The consolation is we have a doubles pair in Colin Fleming and Ken Skupski who are now in the top 60 in the world rankings after a great 2009 and Lloyd is assuming that rubber is in the bag.
Worringly, their form in the New Year has not been good. Defeat would mean a play-off with Turkey or Ireland and another reverse would then mean that at least the only way from there would be up.
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Date published :
02 Mar 2010 - 07:12:26
