If Aljaz Bedene – a resident of Welwyn Garden City since 2008 and a British passport-holder since March – had been available for selection against Australia in the semi-finals of the Davis Cup in Glasgow this weekend, there is every likelihood the Great Britain captain, Leon Smith, would have picked him.
Instead, while the No55-ranked Bedene prepares for his next eligibility appeal in front of an International Tennis Federation panel in Paris in mid-November, Smith must choose between his next-best options, both of whom who are carrying bruises of a different kind, the world No141 James Ward and Kyle Edmund (100).
Ward is hurting mentally after nine successive defeats since a good start at Wimbledon, while Edmund finally convinced Smith on Wednesday that a rolled right ankle he suffered in practice on Tuesday has recovered.
As for the 300-ranked Daniel “Whatever Happened To” Evans, he has been in sparkling form, winning 37 of 49 matches this year, and he turned a few heads when he arrived to train with the team in Glasgow this week. It would be a surprise if Smith asked Evans to play at the last minute, but he is here as cover and is definitely in the frame.
“We have worked so hard to get to this semi-final stage,” Smith said on Wednesday, “and I’m certainly not going to leave anything to chance. If it came back that [Edmund’s injury] was a serious [one], and we had another injury – which can happen in sport – I’d look pretty crazy if I didn’t have any back-up here.
“Fortunately it’s not serious. He took a tumble on court. It wasn’t the most glamorous tumble I’ve ever seen. He wasn’t covering the whole court so it wasn’t too serious and he was able to hit pain free today.”
Edmund, who strained stomach muscles that forced his exit from the French Open before his second-round match against the Australian Nick Kyrgios, has been resting since failing to qualify for the US Open. “I went for a scan last night and this morning, which came back and showed nothing, just a bit of fluid,” he said.
Australia have had disruption of a more intriguing kind, the captain Wally Masur dropping Kyrgios, who left a trail of headlines in his wake last summer, some of them brilliant for him, others not quite so uplifting, and restoring the ever-turbulent Bernard Tomic.
So the responsibility for taking it to Great Britain falls to the 34-year-old Lleyton Hewitt in his farewell to the competition, a final thrash in the big time before he plays his last Australian Open in January. The former world No1 tried to put the pressure back on Great Britain’s perennial trump card, Andy Murray.
“I think a lot of the pressure is on Andy,” Hewitt said, “so whoever gets the opportunity to take him on on day one has got nothing to lose. You can go out free-swinging and play your game. Andy pretty much has got to win that match in a lot of ways. So it’s going to be a bigger rubber for them. And these young boys [Tomic and Thanasi Kokkinakis] are big-match players as well.
“Grothy [Sam Groth] and I teamed really well under massive pressure in Darwin in July [to beat Kazakhstan in the quarter-final], so we’re going to be ready for the battle all weekend.”
Hewitt said of Murray: “I have a great relationship with Andy, I know he’s been massive for tennis right across Great Britain and obviously the support he gets coming back here to play in Scotland – he’s very proud to be Scottish. We have a great rivalry with Great Britain and this is hopefully just another chapter.”
