MATCH POINT: Team events in tennis are a faded jewel - they can be confusing for fans and often lose credibility... but they could still be vital for the sport's future

There was a coming together of two different tribes at London’s Olympic Park over the weekend, where British tennis fans mingled with those flocking next door to West Ham’s Premier League fixture.

The claret and blues heavily outnumbered those heading for the Copper Box, but it was still a decent turnout for a low-key Billie Jean King Cup match against Sweden, featuring only one high-profile player in Katie Boulter.

Heartening, too, that there was a high representation of families among the more than 10,000 spectators who attended across the two days.

It was more proof, as if any were needed, that well-promoted team events can attract interest that others of the more regular variety may struggle to reach. A more cohesively organised sport would recognise the value of team formats, but sadly there is no area of the professional game which exemplifies the need for better governance.

The men’s Davis Cup is a faded jewel, although next week’s finals promise to make the best of a botched job. This is partly because the world’s best player, Novak Djokovic, is among those giving it legitimacy by playing.

The quarter-final between Great Britain and Serbia in Malaga will be fascinating, although the fixture structure is hopeless for fans who do not know who will survive into the semis and final the same week. Yet another error is that Spain, knocked out in the group stage, were not guaranteed a place in their home country.

The Billie Jean King Cup continues to struggle and last week’s finals lost credibility once world No1 Iga Swiatek and the top Americans pulled out. This was due to its ludicrous positioning relative to the WTA season-ending event seven time zones away in Mexico.

Sometimes tennis team events seem designed to confuse fans. Australia’s United Cup in January is the successor to the short-lived ATP Cup, whose introduction nobody quite understood the reason for in a month that already has a blockbuster start to the season.

The United Cup has some good men’s and women’s names this year but its selection system is a severe flaw, with the number one players backed up largely by unknowns.

Before all this was Perth’s Hopman Cup, a well-established event of limited scope which worked perfectly well. Somehow this has ended up in Nice on clay after Wimbledon. You have to wonder how long its reincarnation will last.

Then we have the Laver Cup, whose 2023 edition was a contrasting flop to the scenes of Roger Federer’s farewell in London. Gael Monfils even admitted he was only there for the showboating.

Stung by this year’s lack of Grand Slam champions, Federer and his fellow promoters have already offered Carlos Alcaraz a huge sum to guarantee his appearance in Berlin after the US Open next year. That this has happened so early only confirms the Team Europe v Team World match, no matter how slickly it is promoted, has to be regarded as an exhibition.

We are left with an unsatisfactory variety of team competitions, none of them hitting the spot like the Davis Cup once did. A genuine World Cup of tennis involving men and women would be ideal, not situated at one end of the season or the other.

Anyone familiar with the inner workings of tennis will know that sorting it out will be easier said than done. A start, at least, would be a summit with just one item on the agenda — how to maximise the appeal of team events.

A solution to the dawdling at last!

While speculation continues about future Saudi involvement in tennis, it is sure that the men’s Under-21 NextGen Finals will be landing there later this month, serving as the usual test bed for innovations.

Not all of these ever get translated on to the main ATP Tour, but it shows that someone is thinking about how to update the offering in line with modern viewing habits.

The most significant trial this year is limiting the time between first and second serves to eight seconds.

It is a tacit admission that, as it stands, the 25-second shot clock rule has done the exact opposite to what was intended in slowing down the game. Umpires being so inconsistent when it comes to pressing the start button has not helped.

If adopted more widely the eight-second rule would affect some players more than others. The obvious, but far from only, candidate is Novak Djokovic. It was interesting to watch him on Sunday night and take a random sample of how long he spends with his endless ball-bouncing between serves, but on the basis of a random sample he always took longer than eight seconds and on one point he allowed himself 19 seconds before launching his second delivery.

This is about as long as it will take for his ardent followers to sniff a conspiracy in the NextGen experiment.

A more incidental change will be the umpires’ chairs being set lower to reduce the impairment of spectator sightlines. If ever there was a metaphor for the reduced role of human officials in tennis, then this is surely it.

The future's bright for women's tennis

We often hear, and heard again at the weekend, that Anne Keothavong has options at her disposal as GB Billie Jean King Cup captain. The situation might be better than at some points in recent times, but with only two players in the top 130 and one in the top 90 the British system is not exactly a conveyor belt. You can say similar about the well-funded centralised systems in France and Australia.

There does appear, however, to be an unusually promising generation of girls around their early to mid-teens on the horizon. At the weekend Great Britain finished third in the junior version of the BJK Cup in Cordoba. 

Mingge Xu, Hannah Klugman and Hephzibah Oluwadare were knocked out of the semi-finals by the outstanding Czechs — now there is a country with a conveyor belt — and beat Spain in the third place play-off.

There are a few other prospects around that age group, too, such as Isabelle Lacy and Mika Stojsavljevic. All of them face a long and complicated road ahead but, as ever, it is a numbers game. The more in the mix, the better chances of a few emerging at the end of it.