[DC]Is this Argentina's Year?
05 Feb 2004 - Chris Bowers
Is this Argentina's Year?
It seems the question is when rather than whether: when will Argentina win
the Davis Cup by BNP Paribas? Semi-finalists in the last two years, the
Argentines have six players in the world's top 50, and two in the top 10
who can play well on all surfaces. So is this the year the Davis Cup will
go to South America for the first time?
Argentina is enjoying a golden age, but its Achilles heel in Davis Cup is
the away tie. A few nations get lucky in having home ties all the way
through (like Spain in 2000 and France in 1999), but in general, if you
want to win tennis's premier team tennis competition, you have to be able
to win away.
Argentina's record is not encouraging. The last time it won an away tie was
in the American zone 1 relegation round against Colombia in 2000, and it
hasn't won away in the World Group since beating New Zealand on the grass
of Wilding Park in 1991.
It's a problem known to Argentina's captain Gustavo Luza. "To a certain
extent it's a matter of luck," he says, "but our goal is big, and we know
that if we want to go a long way we have to be able to be strong at home
and away. Whether it's home or away is out of our hands, so we have to
learn to live with that."
As if to make the point, Argentina reached the semi-finals in the past
two years, winning its first two rounds at home but then losing away,
first in Russia and then last year in Spain. This year the campaign starts
away in Agadir against Morocco, in what is the host nation's first World
Group tie on home soil.
Agadir is an unprepossessing city, which warrants just two mentions in the
history books. In 1911 the German Kaiser sent a gunboat to the Moroccan port
in an incident which almost caused the first world war to start three years
earlier than it actually did. And in 1960 a severe earthquake reduced most
of the city to rubble and cost more than a thousand people their lives.
The result is a modern city with very little architecture over 40 years old,
and a thriving tourist industry, especially in early February when large
numbers of Germans and other north Europeans seek a break from the cold
winter weather. The temperature this week reached the mid-20s (Celsius),
which would make for pleasant outdoor tennis.
Yet Morocco has decided to play the tie against Argentina on a fast indoor
carpet court in the Salle des Sports, an indoor arena normally used for
basketball just a few minutes픠walk from the Royal Tennis Club of Agadir.
The thinking is to take the Argentines - especially their top-ranked player
Guillermo Coria - off his favourite clay in the hope of unsettling him. But
while it might work for one rubber, it's unlikely to work over a whole
weekend, and the Argentine team may well emerge from this weekend with the
beginnings of a belief that they can win outside Buenos Aires.
Luza is a key figure in this. Though Argentina is enjoying a boom in top-50
players, most of them have come to prominence through private help, rather
than through a national training programme. The result has been a fierce
sense of competition among them that hasn't always been easy to mould into
a coherent team unit.
Luza was not only a Davis Cup player himself (known in locker rooms as "Lucky
Luza"), but was the head of Argentina's junior development in the late 1990s,
so travelled extensively with Coria and David Nalbandian. That shared history
as a figure of authority means that if anyone can get the disparate units
working as a team, he can, and the willingness of his two top-tenners to
make the trip to Morocco the week after Melbourne shows the sense of Davis
Cup purpose he has instilled in his players.
His one major problem is that Nalbandian is both his best doubles player and
one of his best two singles players, yet few teams go all the way in Davis Cup
relying on someone playing on all three days. In practice this week, Luza has
been trying to bed down the partnership of Agustin Calleri and the doubles
specialist Lucas Arnold, who beat Albert Costa and Alex Corretja in
September's semi-final. Yet the searing returns and acute volleys of
Nalbandian have been causing Calleri and Arnold problems, which in turn
must make Luza wonder whether to throw Nalbandian in on Saturday.
If the Argentinians do spoil the Moroccans' party, as seems likely, the road
for them gets no easier. For the quarter-finals, they could well have to
travel to Russia, where they lost the semi-final two years ago, and if they
won that they could have to travel to Australia or the USA.
The question is still when rather than whether, but if Argentina is to do it
in 2004, it will be doing it the hard way.
--
當我走進一個房間──總是一個房間，鏡子竟沒有將我認出？
--
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