According to today’s edition of l’Équipe, everything was set to welcome the Swiss to the city of Pau, near the Spanish border, indoors on hard courts in April for the Davis Cup quarter-finals.
But the American upset has changed the data. And now the French are scrambling a little bit.
Coach Lionel Roux joked they should play it in Corsica. They even joked about playing it in Gael Monfils’s ancestral homeland of Martinique, but that would be awfully close to America.
The French team director in charge of logistics (yes, they have jobs like these in French tennis) says it’s possible to play outdoors in France the first weekend of April. But they are bound by the ITF rule that requires at least 10 hours of daylight. That means heading south.
Captain Guy Forget was far from convinced that clay is the best choice.
““It would be a mistake to go to the extremes in the choice of surface,” he said. “An intermediate, somewhat slow hard court – and mostly with a low bounce – would be pertinent. In the absolute, it would be better outdoors. But it’s never good to choose a surface solely to penalize the opponent.”
The team met Sunday night in Vancouver to have some preliminary talks before going their separate ways (Benneteau and Monfils to San José, Llodra all the way to Rotterdam), with the absent Richard Gasquet opining from Rotterdam that his choice was clay.
“But it would be better to have it outdoors. In the colder air, the ball doesn’t fly as much, so it slows the game down,” he said.
The French have 15 days to make the call.
(Source http://blogs.montrealgazette.com/2012/02/14/french-debating-choice-of-surface-for-u-s-tie/)
