Oliver Marach, together with Philipp Oswald, has secured the third point for the Austrians in the Davis Cup duel against Belarus. The Styrian-Vorarlberg mating settled in the VAZ from St. Pölten against Ilya Ivashka and Andrei Vasilevski 6:3,7:6 (5). This means that Austria has entered the second round of Europe/Africa Zone I.
After the individual victories on Friday by Gerald Melzer and Dominic Thiem, Marach/Oswald had gone into the doubles with a “match ball”, where they lived up to their favourite role.
Due to their strong performance of the day before, the Belarusians started a little surprisingly with Ivashka instead of Sergey Betov. Marach/Oswald often hinted at the 23-year-old to test his volley in the early stages.
This paid off: Ivashka made some mistakes, which led to a quick 3-0 lead for the Austrians. At that time, the captain of the Belarussians, Vladimir Voltchkov, had a lot to discuss with his double. He took advantage of the side changes clearly above the referee’s “time”call to give his players tips.
These were supposed to pay off, because in the eighth game they managed a rebreak from scratch. Vasilevski caught an inattentive Marach on the net and put a backhand along the line past the Styrian, which is well worth seeing.
But the latter immediately made up for his mistake in the following game, when it was him who duped Vasilevski with a backhand passing ball to the renewed loss of serve. A few minutes later, Marach served solidly to win the set.
At the beginning of the second round, more and more coordination problems became apparent in the doubles of the guests. The approximately 2,500 spectators in the VAZ watched an early break from Marach/Oswald to 2-1, and there was a lot of evidence of a safe two-stage win.
Suddenly, however, Oswald had to face a 0:40 on his own serve, Ivashka/Vasilevski missed all three break chances at first, but with two half-volleys from Vasilevski worth seeing, they took the serve from the Vorarlberg player.
As a result, all four players had no trouble getting their service games through. It was a bit dicey in the eighth game, when Oswald hit his partner hard on the head with a first serve. Marach shook briefly and shortly afterwards was there with two winners.
In the second set, for example, they went into a tiebreak, in which the Austrians quickly moved away to 6:1. The guests fought their way back to 6:5, but after one hour and 33 minutes the victory and the ascent was perfect for Austria.
Marach and Oswald met with Alexander Peya at the Australian Open to discuss who should play against Belarus for the Davis Cup match. Marach was already set in series after his brilliant run of three tournament victories. For the second place in Stefan Koubek’s five-man squad, Oswald was chosen because of the better ranking and his rising form curve.
But Peya was also in St.. Pölten on site. Together with Julian Knowle, who is currently injured at the elbow, he received the ITF Commitment Award. This prize is awarded to those players who have already won more than 20 Davis Cup bets.