Davis Cup final on December 3, 2006 in Moscow.
Photo: Dmitry Azarov
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Russia Wins Davis Cup
// Marat Safin Defeats Argentina's Acasuso to Clinch Russian Tennis Victory
Yesterday, for the second time in history, the men's Russian national tennis team brought home one of the sporting world's most prestigious prizes: the Davis Cup. In the fifth game of the final in Moscow, Marat Safin clinched the victory for the Russian team over the Argentine national team by defeating Jose Acasuso.
Russia won its first Davis Cup title as the visiting underdog four years ago in Paris. Even though yesterday's victory was won with a home court advantage, it was greeted with unbridled jubilation by the players, the fans, and even Russian President Vladimir Putin, who called team captain Shamil Tarpishchev after the final match to congratulate him and his players personally on the victory.
That the Russians were particularly overjoyed by the home victory was not surprising. Russian tennis has achieved colossal successes in the last ten years, but most of them have been enjoyed abroad. The team had two previous chances to win the Davis Cup in front of a home audience, in 1994 and 1995, but on those occasions they fell to the Swedes and the Americans, respectively. The victory was also especially sweet since it came in a hard-fought fifth game, the last match of the final, when Marat Safin overcame the sting of a first-day loss to Argentine team leader David Nalbandian to pull out a win over Acasuso. Despite Safin's previously unimpressive season, Russian captain Tarpishchev was not led wrong by the same sixth sense that led him to trust a young Mikhail Yuzhny in the crucial final game in Paris four years ago, with remarkably successful results.
Saturday's doubles match, which pitted the dual of David Nalbandian and Augustin Calieri against Dmitry Trusunov and Marat Safin, who was playing in place of Mikhail Yuzhny, also featured impressive playing from the Russian side. Safin, eager to avenge his earlier loss to Nalbandian, took advantage of unaccountably terrible play by the Argentine star to walk away with the match. It would have seemed that a Russian victory was already in the bag, if not for one thing. It is a well-known Davis Cup statistic that the team who wins the doubles match usually goes on the win the trophy. In recent years, there has been only one exception to the rule: in Paris in 2002, when Russia faced France. Then, the French won the doubles match 2:1, but Marat Safin and Mikhail Yuzhny came back in the last two games to win the two points needed to lift Russia to its first Davis Cup victory.
To make matters worse, David Nalbanian made an impressive comeback in his next match against Nikolai Davydenko, evening the score. Once again, like four years ago in Paris, the score going into the fifth match was two to two. Fortunately, Tarpishchev had not erred in picking Safin for the match: after four sets of blistering play, Safin triumphed in a tiebreaker with a match point that Acasuso was unable to parry. Within a few minutes, the Russian president was on the phone with congratulations for the best tennis team in the world.
Aleksey Dospekhov
All the Article in Russian as of Dec. 04, 2006
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