Australia's Lleyton Hewitt and Wayne Arthurs and Argentina's David Nalbandian will carry the bulk of the workload for their countries in a Davis Cup quarterfinal that will renew longtime rivalries between the two top singles players.
Hewitt and Arthurs are both scheduled to play two singles matches and will combine for doubles tomorrow. Nalbandian will also play two singles matches for Argentina and has been paired with Mariano Puerta in doubles.
The 24-year-old Hewitt beat Nalbandian in the Wimbledon final in 2002 and needed four hours and five sets in an often spiteful match to beat the South American in this year's Australian Open quarterfinals.
During that match, Nalbandian appeared to brush past Hewitt during a changeover. Before the match, which featured a 100-minute fifth set with only one break of serve, Nalbandian had said that Hewitt's on-court antics, including frequent chants of "Come On," were "not very good for the sport."
Nalbandian and Hewitt aren't scheduled to meet until Sunday in reverse singles, and might not at all if the match has been decided 3-0 by the end of tomorrow's doubles, which is unlikely.
Hewitt, who also played a fiery match with another Argentinian player, Juan Ignacio Chela, at the Australian Open this year -- Chela was fined for spitting in the direction of Hewitt -- has refused to be drawn into discussion on his on-court behavior. Hewitt has deferred such questions to Australian captain John Fitzgerald to answer.
Nalbandian also wouldn't answer questions on the issue yesterday at the draw, saying "we will see what happens on Sunday."
Hewitt was sick with the chicken pox when the two teams last met in 2002, a 5-0 whitewash for Argentina on clay at Buenos Aires.
This time the teams will meet on a portable grass court at the Sydney International Tennis Center, the former Olympic complex where Hewitt has lost only one career match -- at the 2000 Olympics.
Today, Hewitt will open against Argentina's second-ranked player, Guillermo Coria, while Arthurs takes on Nalbandian. Nalbandian has a 2-1 career edge over Arthurs, including a four-set, fourth-round win at Wimbledon in 2002 that featured tiebreakers in the second and fourth sets.
Hewitt and Coria have met only once, with the Australian winning on a hardcourt at Indian Wells in 2003 after coming back from one set down.
Fitzgerald said he hopes Hewitt can give Australia an early lead on Friday.
"I'm pleased with the fact that we've got, with the exception of Roger Federer, the best grass-court player in the world to lead things off for us," Fitzgerald said.
The Australia-Argentina winner will play a September semifinal away against either the Netherlands or Slovakia, the other two teams in the top half of the Davis Cup draw.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier