GBJ wrote:

---

Have I understood correctly that the GB Germany tie starts now? I'm in California so it's only 6.30am here and I can't watch or listen so have been relying on the BBC live text which has not come up yet.

---

GB tie was always meant to start at 5.30pm Madrid time (same as the Spain-Argentina tie), so that's 4.30pm UK and 8.30am California.

GBJ wrote:

---

Haven't been keeping up with this thread so sorry ifor this was already covered. What are the rules about how or whether you can switch you players around and who counts as your number 1? Is it purely on current ranking as to who is your no. 1 and to choice of Captain as to who to play? As in Kyle is is no1 if he plays with Andy but is no 2 if he plays with Dan? Or can they try to guess what the other team are doing and switch it round to suit them etc?

---

 Hi GBJ, your guess is correct - order is based on ranking, so Andy would always be #2 (no protected rankings) and Dan would always be #1, Kyle would be 1 ahead of Andy, 2 behind Dan. 

And , yes, the actual selection is down to the Captain of the team, indeed also with doubles pair. #2 always plays first, followed by 1 and then singles.

The teams need to be announced 1 hour or more before play, so GB team announcement is imminent. I suspect Kyle at 1 and Andy at 2 but we will see.   

Ace Ventura wrote:

---

There's so much that could be done with this event, but there are a few obvious issues that they really do need to change straight away. I'd personally love a 2 week event where men and women were competing at the same time in the same venue - I'm not sure whether this would be for their individual DC and FC competitions, or whether it would be completely mixed, with mixed doubles playing a key role, so basically a bigger / enhanced version of the Hopman cup - I'd probably prefer the former, so that the DC and FC legacies can live on in some capacity, but an event where the majority of the top 32 or so men and women are competing would definitely appeal to me.

They really do need longer than 7 days in this current format, or possibly add a second venue in the same city as Stuart Fraser and Jamie Murray suggested, and avoid having another tie following on from an earlier one. You could have 4 starting at 12pm local (over 2 venues) and the chances are one of the ties would go really deep so that TV would get at least one match going to like 9pm, but crucially none going into the early hours. Removing the 2 WCs and having 4 x 4 groups might work better, then while some could still concede doubles if they wanted (they need something to penalise that), at least it would be an obvious 2 going through from each group (the top 2) and would remove the 2 best runners up, so the walkover benefits would be less crucial. There would be more group matches with this, but if every nation played group matches M, T, W across the 2 venues (ideally it would be over 10-14 days, and one would play M W F and others T T S) it could work better. I guess in this situation adding a separate women's competition would probably be unrealstic as there'd be far too many matches, and would only work if they were mixed teams of 6, but then they could do what they do in Rogers Cup and have them in different cities within the same country (and time zone), and at least TV and the armchair fans would get the benefits.

I guess they could maybe add another round of qualifiers - perhaps giving the higher ranked nations a bye into the FQR to avoid the issue of the tope players playing too many rounds, which was one of the reasons for the changes, but this time you'd get powerhous ties like Italy vs Belgium and France vs Canada as a FQR, rather than say Italy vs Uzbekistan / Austria, and then have a final comp of 8 nations, 2 groups of 4 to make it much more manageable, but then again, the less nations involved in the actual 'finals', may result in less fans being invested if their particular nation didn't make it, which was another key reason for changing it in the first place, and 12 nations wouldn't be much better than 18 in terms of even groups, although 4 groups of 3 and only one advancing to the semi finals like WTA Zhuhai could possibly work.

The date isn't great either as a lot of players are tired at this stage of the season as has been documented, but it's also not great for fans attending - I think there may have been a few more in Europe willing to travel to somehwere like Madrid if they found a gap in either April or September, and at the start / end of holiday season, rather than the end of November.

I've thought a lot about this, and it is something I'm really interested in (as you can probably tell, ha), and I just hope they can make the relevant changes to create an excellent, exciting event and not the current one with a lot of potential, but unfortunate obvious issues.

---

 I agree with a lot of what you say, and the BBC report today postulates a mixed event. I would imagine if that happened, it would be branded the World Cup of Tennis for the Davis Cup/Fed (eration) Cup (for me it still is the Federation Cup and they should go back to that, IMO). 

Yeah, 10 days event if 16 teams of men and women you would need definitely two venues to play 24 (2 x 12) group matches over 6 days, or a venue that could hold 4 different courts - that would almost certainly need to be outdoors I think and if outdoors it could be managed - September would provide options for US or Europe still (southern) or even Asia - whereas December like now would mean Asia again, or Australia/South Africa/South America as options. If you played it outdoors with 4 courts, after the 6 days of group play, you could have 2 quarterfinal days, 2 for the semis, and then womens and mens finals on consecutive days, so probably a 12 day event would be needed. The other option is no QF round, but my concern there is that teams may effectively be out after 1 match and that wouldnt be a good thing.