
It’s the Davis Cup World Group semi-finals this weekend and the first legs of the singles rubber’s kick-off the action today. France face Spain in Lille for the ninth time in the Davis Cup, the Spanish lead the head-to-head 6-2 and they won the last meeting in Croatia back in 2010. The venue Stade Pierre Mauroy is a big indoors venue, which should insure an electric and noisy atmosphere. Both teams are evenly matched on paper, they have a good blend of experienced veterans and talent like Gasquet and Bautista Agut and proven younger Next Gen stars like Pouille and Carreno-Busta. This should result in plenty of high quality, dramatic and exciting matches over the weekend, and with home soil advantage I think France will edge this one, but it’s likely to be a real close one that could go down to the wire on Sunday.
The other semi-final is between Croatia and the USA at the Sportski centar Visnjik, Zadar, Croatia and previous encounters suggest this one is going to Croatia, as they won all four of their Davis Cup ties and the USA. Also, to make things harder for the USA they are missing the experience of veterans Isner and Querrey this weekend, which diminishes their chances of success considerably, when Croatia have Cilic and Coric as their main singles players and the USA Johnson and Tiafoe.
Just a reminder the main ATP Tour gets underway again on Monday and it heralds the start of the Asian hard court swing with the highlight being the Shanghai Masters 1000 Series.
Selections:
None.