There is more at stake in the new ATP Cup than $15m in prize money and 750 ranking points for the world’s best players. The real prize for the backers of the 24-country competition, which launches the 2020 season in three cities across Australia over the next 10 days, is the soul of tennis.
There will be sceptics lining up to see it fail, of course. They will point out it is an innovation too far, coming less than two months after the revamped Davis Cup, which used an eerily similar format for 18 finalists and which was marketed as the World Cup of Tennis.
The cautious supporters of the new competition include Tim Henman, who will captain the Great Britain team and is yet to be convinced there is room in the game’s calendar for the two team cups as well as the exhibition Laver Cup.
“In an ideal world, no,” he said, as Great Britain prepared for their opening tie in Sydney on Friday, against Bulgaria in Group C, without Andy Murray – who nominated Henman for the job. “I am interested in how the ATP Cup works. There is a large number of players, and it is in a large country approaching the Australian Open. There is a lot to do.”
Underpinning the latest grab for the loyalty and bucks of the game’s worldwide audience of millions is a turgid rivalry between the organisers of the two competitions, one towards the end of the longest season in sport, and this one at the beginning.
The Association of Tennis Professionals (an uneasy conglomerate who have their internal rows to sort out) have for years urged compromise with the International Tennis Federation, the game’s long-time guardians who grew more desperate by the season as leading players refused to fit the old home-and-away Davis Cup into their busy and lucrative schedules.
It is a towering irony that the most innovative administrator the game has had in decades, Chris Kermode, has been levered out of his job as the ATP’s executive chairman and president – the result of an unseemly feud with the world No 2, Novak Djokovic – on the eve of the launch of his latest experiment. Kermode will be watching his new baby from a distance, pleased at least that it will introduce many of the ideas he road-tested in the NextGen Cup for the game’s rising stars.
By general consensus, the new Davis Cup, driven by the Barcelona footballer Gerard Pique and won by the home country on the back of another extraordinary contribution from Rafael Nadal, worked well enough, albeit with plenty of fine-tuning to be done before the next final there towards the end of this year.
So the ATP Cup has to reach that benchmark at least and Ross Hutchins, the competition’s managing director who will oversee its genesis in Brisbane, Perth and Sydney, scene of the final on 12 January, brings a smile and confidence to his task.
“The event is going to play a pioneering role in innovation in our sport,” Hutchins said, as James Ward arrived to replace the rehabbing Murray. It has, he added, given the ATP a chance to introduce “[new] rules, technology, behind-the-scenes access, event production and more. The ATP Cup is set to shine a new and unique light on our sport. It will bring the fans and players closer together, and on a much bigger scale, than we’ve seen before in tennis.”
Among the new bells and whistles will be the game’s quickfire and hopefully less controversial version of VAR, a video review operating courtside to sort out double bounces, foul shots, touches or invasion. Teams will occupy corners of stadiums, rather than sitting along either side of the umpire, and will be armed with an array of technology and statistics to aid on-court coaching.
The group stages will be played over the first six days and the tournament will then move to Sydney for a four-day knockout in the final eight, before everyone heads for Melbourne and the Australian Open on 20 January, a caravan of millionaires, as ever, unsure of their final destination.
In an optimistic twist, there will be a new canopy over the Ken Rosewall Arena in Sydney, which will host Britain’s group stage as well as the final. If ever there was an appropriate time for the heavens to rain on a parade, it surely is in the tinder-dry settings of fire-ravaged NSW.
Hutchins, meanwhile, will hope that a new audience can see through the lingering smoke to embrace a project designed to bring clarity to a sport wandering still through its own self-induced haze.
