Last summer, in the beautiful green mountains of Stowe, Vermont, the USA battled the Russians and gave the eventually champions all they could handle, before falling 3-2 after an epic doubles match as thunderstorms threatened.  When they meet again this weekend, in Moscow, it will not be nearly as exciting.  The reason is simple, player participation.  For the Russians, they will yet again be featuring their two best players, both ranked top 10 in the world, Anna Chakvatadze and Svetlana Kuznetsova.  The USA on the other hand, will not have Venus Williams to do battle against the Russians.  Instead, Team USA will feature a few bright, young players such as Vania King, Ahsha Rolle and Madison Brengle.  In addition, the top ranked doubles player in the world, Liezel Huber, will join Team USA for the first time (she is a former South African who has recently gained US citizenship).   While it will be a nice chance for the future stars of US Women’s tennis to show what they can do on the international stage, it’s a shame players such as Serena Williams, Lindsay Davenport or Jill Craybas will not be competiting, because as it stands, Team USA does not stand a chance…but hey, at least I am not running the VIP transportation.

I’ll be honest, the only player I have heard of in the other Semifinal matchup, China vs. Spain (in Beijing), is Shuai Peng.  However, after doing a bit of research, it seems as though China has the slightly stronger singles players, and much stronger doubles team, so they would be my pick.  Although if gambling on this Fed Cup Tie, please don’t put any stock into what I just wrote.

I linked to Gimelstob’s blog about Fed Cup yesterday, but only after writing about this weekend did it really hit me…as much as I complain about the Davis Cup format, the Fed Cup is really in need of some changes.  This weekend is the Semi’s, four teams comprised of four players each - out of 16 players only three are marquee names (all Russians - Kuznetsova, Chakvatadze & Safina).  Maybe as countries like Serbia, featuring Ana Ivanovic and Jelena Jankovic (who both participated in a World Group playoff this winter) make their way into the World Group, the competition will be a bit more in line with the Davis Cup. 

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 24th, 2008 at 3:28 pm and is filed under Tennis News, Davis/Fed Cup. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.