Anyway there should be"favouritism" in favour of the plauets that the captain most thinks will get the job done.
Once again selecting purely by WTA ranking / "playing a straight bat"?? ).would surely be a cop out of responsibility
With a small player pool, the captain needs to keep them all on her side, injuries to your favorites at the wrong time and you'll be up the creek without a paddle.
You keep them on side by letting the WTA rankings select the team?
Well I think it's more about having a clear, simple and transparent selection criteria and doing everything you can to keep all the players in the loop, in order to foster the team ethic.
Maybe that's where Anne messed up with Jodie - by not selecting Jodie in April when she normally always follows rankings and rankings said she should have done and therefore Jodie thinking that her captain didn't really have any faith in her?
I still think it's great that we are able to have this conversation about choice. The period when we didn't have any Top 100 players (or players who had been Top 100), and we had no expectations.
I guess we'll never know how much not being picked affected Jodie's nerves going into this match. At the end of the day she was playing well enough to lead 4-0, before a spectacular collapse. Not the first time her form has dipped dramatically when things aren't going her way so maybe more symptomatic of an ongoing issue in more high pressured circumstances.
To be honest, I was being slightly tongue in cheek in the comment above.
Yes, as you say, net net, we'll never know - Jodie messed up bigtime by completely collapsing at 4-0 up against a far lower ranked player who wasn't even playing lights out tennis, and Anne messed up bigtime for not managing the situation and getting Jodie back on track, which is the captain's job, especially when it's a very predictable risk.
But there are many horror shows over the year in tennis, from all sorts of players. And life goes on
It will be interesting to see if Jodie can just forget about this. as a player who can struggle with the mental side it could take her a while.
Well we will soon find out as she is due to play Andorra week commencing 27th November.
In the normal week to week course of events I have always got the impression that Jodie moves on fairly quickly after matches, however much she had imploded at the time.
This is probably a bigger deal but hopefully she can still refocus and move on.
Jodie was the only British player to beat Jo Konta in the last decade. (excluding matches when Jo retired) That was at the Battle of Britain Team competition in July 2020. The previous time before that when Jo lost to a Brit (excluding her retirement in a match ) was to Anna Fitzpatrick at Tallin in August 2010 . In a later match in the Battle of Brits Jo beat Katie Boulter.
Jodie was the only British player to beat Jo Konta in the last decade. (excluding matches when Jo retired) That was at the Battle of Britain Team competition in July 2020. The previous time before that when Jo lost to a Brit (excluding her retirement in a match ) was to Anna Fitzpatrick at Tallin in August 2010 . In a later match in the Battle of Brits Jo beat Katie Boulter.
Before that Jo lost to Laura at Roehampton 2008. I always wondered which of the two Australian born players would go the highest. Laura got off to an early start but never really recovered from her injuries.