He tries, but he doesn't quite succeed: the Davis Cup fails to take flight.
The current project is weakened, light years away from the one that Kosmos Tennis had delimited a few years ago, the one we knew as the Davis de Piqué.
Four years after that exciting and controversial Tennis World Cup that had taken shape in the Caja Mágica in Madrid, in 2019, the tournament has lost strength and luster, weighed down by some organizational problems (how can we forget those matches that closed at dawn? ?) and the disenchantment of some early swords.
If in that 2019 talents like Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, Andy Murray, Denis Shapovalov, Andrey Rublev or Matteo Berrettini had won -only Roger Federer and Sasha Zverev had turned their backs on the tournament-, this edition is a painful imitation of that. Only two Top 10 will appear at the Martín Carpena Sports Palace: the Canadian Felix Auger-Aliassime (6th) and the American Taylor Fritz (9th).
While waiting for the Australia (without Kyrgios)-Netherlands (under the umbrella of Van de Zandschulp) that starts this Tuesday, the tennis fan declares himself baffled, since the final phase is born decaffeinated, possibly also hurt by the temporal parallelism with the another World Cup, the soccer one.
Today there is hardly any talk about tennis.
Today there is hardly any talk of anything other than football.
The situation is confusing, since the revolt was non-negotiable. The old Davis had gotten old. The format was outdated, capricious and inopportune. The players left the clay in Buenos Aires to appear on an indoor court in Minsk. The fans took off: the tournament was played on impulse, in a range of unequal and asymmetric scenarios, often conditioned by the will of the host.
If the host was Spain, it was played on clay. If it was the United States, the most accelerated synthetic possible...
The fan was lost. In February, the British visited Kazakhstan and the Italians, Stockholm, and from those lightning visits we received bits and pieces, scattered results and solitary events that the fans ignored. Annoyed, the tennis players escaped. How inopportune, how annoying that Davis was.
The outcome didn't help either. The final, already in November, at the end of the year, was reduced to a fight between two countries, in the face of global indifference.
What French fan paid attention to a US-Australia final?
Given the vintage detachment and the easements of the calendar, Kosmos Tennis had chosen to rearrange the program. The debate had dragged on for four years, before reaching a consensus. The tennis players were going to meet in the last week of the tennis course in a single city, all at the same time: the Davis Cup was going to become a kind of World Cup of tennis.
The project as such barely lasted a year. The pandemic took it away in 2020.
And when he was reborn, in 2021, he already did so with another face, still in Madrid, although at the Madrid Arena, and with multiple stars turning their backs on him.
In Malaga, now, Sergi Bruguera declares himself sorry. Waiting for Spain's debut against Croatia (on Wednesday), the Spanish captain entrusts himself to Pablo Carreño and Roberto Bautista while cursing his bad luck: the Spaniards have number 1 and 2 on the ATP circuit (Carlos Alcaraz and Rafael Nadal ), but neither of them will wear shorts. The first suffers an abdominal injury and the second declares himself overtaken by the calendar.
-With them (Alcaraz and Nadal) we are stronger, it is evident, but we have five players who have already won many victories and have given us great joy - Bruguera said on Tuesday.
