The reform of the Davis Cup will probably not be as easy as David Haggerty might have imagined.
The good news for the tradition-conscious tennis fans: the ITF does not yet function as autocratically as FIFA. While the President’s suggestion to host a final round of 48 teams in the World Football Association’s astonished frowning over the President’s suggestion is quickly followed by a positive response, David Haggerty in World Tennis is not so easy. The more so as he manages – and wants to redesign – a competition that is by no means as important to the most important players, the athletes, as it is to participate in a football World Cup.
In any case, Haggerty didn’t get a lot of positive comments on the proposed tournament with 18 teams, which has to be voted on in the ITF this summer. One hears from the DTB, for example, that this term of office is also the last of the impetuous US-American. Criticism also comes from a country that has been very successful in playing around with the ugliest salad bowl in recent years: Belgium.
At home against Great Britain in 2015, last year in France David Goffin’s team lost, but the home games in Belgium were popular festivals. If André Stein, the president of the Belgian Tennis Association, is to stay that way.
“This proposal is exactly what we do not want, because Belgium will never have the means to organise such an event. That’s why our fans and partners would be deprived of the already very rare opportunity to see the best Belgian players playing for their country.”
In addition, Stein already knew that France, the defending champion’s country, would also vote against the proposal.
A man who is very familiar with the Davis Cup in its original form is Todd Woodbridge. The Australian double specialist has played a total of 32 times for his country. Woodbridge is particularly critical of the ITF’s poor communication and back-room diplomacy.
“I’ve spent the last seven weeks in the Australian tennis summer, I’ve been to the Davis Cup and the Fed Cup,”Woodbridge told ABC News,”and I commented on matches with Lleyton Hewitt. There has been no conversation at all on this subject, and the ITF has simply dropped it like a bomb over the tennis landscape:” If you don’t even talk about it with Hewitt, one of the biggest Australian Davis Cup players of all time, the ITF hasn’t done its homework.