Looking forward to Hartford

We were particular that we do our recovery programme and homework well last night and today, it paid off. The strength of the Indian Davis ...

We were particular that we do our recovery programme and homework well last night and today, it paid off. The strength of the Indian Davis Cup team is teamwork and last night, as soon as we finished our match, we got together and helped each other.

This morning we woke up in good spirits and went through our routine. Mahesh recovered well from yesterday’s defeat and, despite being a bit stiff and sore, played with focus and authority to put us 1-0 ahead with two good tie-breaker sets. He served much better than he did yesterday and half the battle was already won. He returned well at times and was actually up 30-15 many times on Kim Nam-Hoon’s serve. Hesh’ must give the big points more attention since he can break serves more often with his kind of returns.

Being a final, I was obviously excited to play singles today and worked out my strategy out to the last detail. The Korean was too soft and did not have any real weapon to hurt me. All he was trying to do was to kick his serve and use his speed to get to the net as fast as possible. In fact, in the first game, I was caught off guard as I expected him to hit a few big serves.

With both the singles win, we retained our supremacy in Asian tennis. It was actually nice to have a really comfortable week where all the teamates got a chance to share the workload. I thank them for their support.

Now, we have the most important week of our career ahead of us. We have about 10 days to prepare for the World Doubles Championships at Hartford.We will get to Hartford four days in advance to get familiar with the weather, atmosphere and the courts. We will have our coaches there to support us and I’m sure we will have the entire country behind us that week.

I would like to thank the readers and from our part, we assure you that we will give our very best effort at Hartford. Cheers!