Mumbai : Looking back at India’s unsuccessful campaign to enter the World Group in Davis Cup, former India tennis captain Vijay Amritraj said it was crucial for the singles players to break into the top 100 of rankings.
“For us to get into the World Group it’s absolutely critical to have players in the top 100. Otherwise it’s hard to push through in four singles matches,” said Amritraj when asked about India’s 1-3 defeat against top seeds Czech Republic in Delhi last week in the World Group play-off tie.
“If you have players in the top 100, preferably in the top 50, then we can push these guys and on a particular day you could actually win. Otherwise it becomes rather difficult.
“It was a real boost after the first day. The first day was unbelievable. I think that’s what Davis Cup is meant to be, the way Som (Somdev Devvarman) won that (his) first match (second singles of the day) against Jiri Vesley (of Czech Republic).
“It was very disappointing on second day, unfortunately (when Leander Paes and Rohan Bopanna surprisingly lost in the doubles), but again you are talking about the no.1 team in the world and we are ranked 21,” he elaborated.
“We got to consistently look for some more players. Yuki is having a good run, though he had a little bit of a setback in the Davis Cup (against the Czechs when he lost both his singles matches). But he did well in New Zealand (in the earlier tie), but did not quite fire up in Delhi.
“If you look at our tennis as a whole it’s critical to have dozens of players coming through at a younger age. You can’t always have one person coming up every ten years. It’s important to have that push at a younger age in bunches, like the French, Spaniards and Swedes. All of them keep pushing themselves and then half a dozen of them rise to the top.”
