Tomas Berdych

Tomas Berdych who played so well on grass at Wimbledon said he was in a good shape. "The last few days I regain my strength, but I played on Friday and Saturday, so that the break was not too long. I'm healthy, the form is there and hopefully will remain. We are looking forward to doing well and go further in Davis Cup".

Davis Cup Team of Czech Republic in Ostrava on Sunday, July 5, 2009

Juan Monaco during a practice session under the eyes of DC captain Tito Vazquez

The Davis Cup team of Argentine is training at the Centre Sportif of the Val d'Or in Paris/Saint-Cloud (France), they have chosen the place because the courts are of the same surface as in Ostrava (indoors/Taraflex carpet). It was an advice of Guy Forget, French Davis Cup captain and a good friend of Tito Vázquez, the captain of Argentine DC.

The Argentinian team: José Acasuso, Leonardo Mayer, Juan Mónaco, with the support of Martín Vassallo Argüello and the junior Facundo Argüello, supervised by captain Tito Vázquez and second captain Ricardo Rivera. Also Javier Maquirraín (doctor), Greco Alejandro (kine), Walter Alfonso (masseur), Luis Pianelli (stringer), Marian Morea (Enrique's daughter and head of delegation), Mora Tcherkaski (representing Havas, the firm that manages the marketing of the Argentina Tennis Association) and Diego Gomez (press, speaks English, Italian and some French!) and unofficially Elseser Cristian (coach of Acasuso) and Emiliano Redondi (coach of Mayer).  

All arrived to Paris on Wednesday, July 1, 2009 - after a flight of 12 hours. They stay at the Hotel Californie, a few blocks from Champs Elysees and the Arc de Triomphe.

Juan Martin del Potro will join the team on Saturday. Then the whole group will fly to Czech Republic on Sunday afternoon.

 

 

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At the airport, before leaving for their trip to Paris: Acasuso, Mayer, Mónaco, Vázquez y Rivera

 

The Argentinian at their arrival in Paris... so happy to play the Davis!

 

Saturday, July 4, 2009 - Juan Martin de Potro, the world number five, was the last to join the team, which is training in Paris since last Wednesday, on a similar surface to the one they will discover in Ostrava. Del Potro arrived in the morning and then had a training session with his fellow partners, Leonardo Mayer, Jose Acasuso, Juan Monaco and Martin Vassallo Arguello. The team will practice tomorrow morning, while in the afternoon the whole group will travel to Ostrava, with a stop over at  Prague.

From official Davis Cup site

01 Jul 2009 - Chris Bowers

Czechs look to make history

All teams want to win Davis Cup by BNP Paribas quarterfinals, but seldom does victory matter so much to the profile of tennis in a nation than it does for the Czech Republic in the forthcoming round of World Group action.

The Czechs are in the last eight for the second year running, but this time they have a home tie against a weakened Argentina side. So will the Cez Arena in Ostrava be the scene of the Czech Republic's first passage to a semifinal since 1996? Everyone connected with attempts to promote tennis in the Czech Republic is fervently hoping so.

Champion nation

Cast your mind back 29 years. In 1980, Czechoslovakia became only the eighth nation on the 80th anniversary of the founding of the Davis Cup to claim the biggest prize in team tennis. With a rising star in Ivan Lendl backed up by such stalwarts as Tomas Smid, Pavel Slozil and the veteran Jan Kodes, the central European nation beat Italy in the final to launch what many believed would be a new golden era in Czechoslovak tennis. A Czech -- albeit one who had defected -- was already at the top of the women's game (Martina Navratilova), and the legacy of the 1960s era of Vera Sukova and... had created an exciting new generation that would make the country a powerhouse of world tennis -- so the thinking went.

Only it never really happened. Despite having players such as Milan Srejber, Miloslav Mecir, Karel Novacek, Petr Korda, Cyril Suk and others (all but the Slovak Mecir were Czechs), Czechoslovakia never reached another final, and 12 years after their sole title, the two nations within a united state agreed to separate. It wasn't until 1994 that the Czech and Slovak Republics played separately in the Davis Cup, and because it had all the top players, the Czech Republic was allowed to keep Czechoslovakia's place in the World Group.

But instead of the Czechs establishing themselves as a top-level tennis nation in their own right, they have only one semifinal to show for their 15 years as a separate country. That was when Korda and Daniel Vacek lost to the Swedish team of Stefan Edberg and Thomas Enqvist in Prague in 1996, and since then, their erstwhile compatriots Slovakia have had more success, reaching the Davis Cup by BNP Paribas final in 2005.

Economic factors

Kodes, the 1993 Wimbledon champion, later Czechoslovak captain and the first president of the Czech tennis association after the break-up of Czechoslovakia, believes economic factors have a large part to play in explaining the Czech Republic's modest performance. "When the communist era ended," he says, "everyone wanted to have their own business " everyone wanted to have a restaurant or some other enterprise, because finally they could. But that meant the parents of talented juniors had no time to give to their children, and if you don't have time to help your children by taking them to coaching and tournaments, they won't do their best.

"In addition, one of the motivations of the Czechoslovak children was that they could travel the world through tennis in a way they could not otherwise, but once the end of communism took away the restrictions on travel, there was less need to be a top sportsman to get out of the country. So these two factors combined to take some of the motivation away, and it led to other sports like football and tennis becoming more attractive to Czechs."

In recent years, the presence of two top-20 players in Tomas Berdych and Radek Stepanek has given the Czech Republic the basis of a team that can challenge in the World Group of the Davis Cup. Double-handedly, they beat Roger Federer's Switzerland in a playoff tie in 2007, and Berdych's retirement with injury in the fourth rubber of last year's quarterfinal robbed the Czechs of a chance to beat Russia. But that was in Moscow -- this time it's at home against an Argentina side missing David Nalbandian and blooding the untried Leonardo Mayer.

Will Stepanek be fit?

Much will depend on the fitness of Stepanek, who - like Berdych - reached the fourth round at Wimbledon but whose five-sets defeat to Lleyton Hewitt caused the knee condition that had forced him to miss the grass court warm-up tournaments to flare up again. "The Davis Cup is in only two weeks time," said Stepanek after the Hewitt match, "which isn't long. I have to look after myself after what I went through in the last few weeks or I won't be ready."

If Stepanek isn't ready, all is not lost for the home nation. In Lukas Dlouhy, the Czechs have a quality doubles player who won the French Open recently, albeit with a non-Czech partner, Leander Paes. If Dlouhy could partner Berdych, and Berdych could win the all-important fourth rubber against Juan-Martin del Potro, then a first semifinal for 13 years is possible even without Stepanek.

While Stepanek acknowledges that, even without Nalbandian, Argentina will be tough opponents, home advantage means the Czechs have been able to pick a fast indoor court in an arena they know well, having staged three of their last four home ties there. And Berdych said at Wimbledon he was looking forward to playing on a surface that's "pretty fast, very similar to a grass court".

All the work put in by officials in the Czech tennis association could be boosted if Berdych can lead the Czechs to victory. But with the visitors boasting the fifth-best player in the world, it could well go down to the fifth rubber.

Team nominations for the 2009 Davis Cup by BNP Paribas World Group Quarterfinals to be played on 10-12 July.

CZECH REPUBLIC v ARGENTINA

Venue: Cez Arena, Ostrava (hard - indoors)

Czech Republic

Tomas Berdych

Radek Stepanek

Ivo Minar

Lukas Dlouhy

Captain: Jaroslav Navratil

Argentina

Juan Martin Del Potro

Jose Acasuso

Leonardo Mayer

Juan Monaco

Captain: Tito Vazquez

Tomas reached Round 4

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