India may be much below Italy in rankings, but their non-playing captain Mahesh Bhupathi Wednesday said his players will not be intimidated by their European opponents in the Davis Cup Qualifiers in Kolkata next month.<\/p>\n
Keeping in mind Italians\u2019 weakness on grass, India have opted for grass courts in South Club here for the February 1-2 fixtures which will be played in new format with the winners making a cut to the 18-nation finals in Madrid next year.<\/p>\n
\u201cNothing can be taken for granted. We are underdogs but my boys will not be intimidated. I feel we have a better chance,\u201d Bupathi told reporters on the sidelines of the first practice session of the team at the Calcutta Gymkhana Club.<\/p>\n
Talking about his personal experience as a Davis Cup player, he said, \u201cWhen I was playing Davis Cup, if I played a top ranked player, it was different for me because I was always competing at the challenger level.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut with these guys, I don\u2019t think ranking plays a factor. I think they actually truly believe that they are capable of beating them if they play well.\u201dBhupathi spoke highly of India number one and world ranked 109 Prajnesh Gunneswaran who has improved 200 ranking places in two years, while he termed world number 131 Ramkumar Ramanathan as \u201csuper dangerous\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cOn these courts, Ram is going to be super dangerous. We all saw what he did in Newport last year, he made the final and he should have won the title. So we\u2019re positive,\u201d Bhupathi said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s definitely an advantage to have a quality left-hander on your team. We\u2019ve never had that ever as far as I can remember. Two years ago when we brought him in, there was a strategic reason for that. It wasn\u2019t because at that time he was ranked 350, but we wanted a lefty and it worked for us,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey got two guys in the top 50, so I don\u2019t think the equation changes for us. We don\u2019t have one guy in the top 100.\u201d Asked about the shortened format, Bhupathi said: \u201cBetter or worse, I don\u2019t know it\u2019s better for India. When you\u2019re trying to upset a team like Italy, obviously beating them in two sets versus three sets is easier asked for me, for my boys.<\/p>\n
In the Australian Open, there\u2019s a super tiebreaker in the men\u2019s singles now, Wimbledon is changing. So yeah, I think everyone will learn to live with it. And it\u2019s the way forward in sport.\u201d India have beaten Italy only once in five Davis Cup ties, and that happened at the very same South Club courts in Kolkata back in 1985.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
India may be much below Italy in rankings, but their non-playing captain Mahesh Bhupathi Wednesday said his players will not be intimidated by their European opponents in the Davis Cup Qualifiers in Kolkata next month. Keeping in mind Italians\u2019 weakness on grass, India have opted for grass courts in South Club here for the February […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":53325,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[122],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53324","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53324"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53324\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53326,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53324\/revisions\/53326"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/53325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}