Britain looking into Davis Cup loss to Lithuania
Tennis newsBritain’s tennis administrators will review the Davis Cup team’s embarrassing 3-2 loss to Lithuania but denied Monday’s reports that they are about to fire captain John Lloyd and replace him with Greg Rusedski.
The loss was Britain’s fifth in a row under Lloyd and it now has to beat Turkey to avoid dropping into the lowest tier of the competition.
Although the Lawn Tennis Association said it would make a quick response to the loss, player director Steve Martens said no decisions had yet been made.
“Clearly we have to be swift and decisive. But it is very important that in the heat of the battle you don’t do anything emotional,” he said. “We have to be looking at this together with the captain, reviewing where we were with our players, where we were with our selection, where we were with the preparation of the players.
“That is exactly what we’ll do over the next few days and the captain will be a full part of that.”
Lloyd said after Sunday’s defeat in Vi lost to a Lithuania team which has only three players ranked in the top 1,000.
But Martens said the LTA had not yet looked at replacing Lloyd and taking on Rusedski, a former U.S. Open runner-up who has turned to coaching promising British players.
“We have had no direct contact at all [with Rusedski],” Martens said. “I think it would also be very disrespectful to a guy like John to do that.
“Greg is a fantastic coach, he works with us, he’s fully on board working with some of the male players and John so far has been fully in the loop in everything we do.”
Monday, March 8th, 2010 at 9:15 pm and is filed under Tennis news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
