Indian Wells – Davis Cup critic Alexander Zverev is himself actively campaigning for Hamburg to host the event and is confident about the group stage in the autumn.
“I think, or it looks like it looks very good and hopefully we can bring the German team and also the Davis Cup to Hamburg in September,” the Olympic tennis champion told the Deutsche Presse-Agentur on the sidelines of the ATP tournament in Indian Wells.
He said his participation in the successful Davis Cup qualifier against Brazil in Rio de Janeiro last week had only looked short-term from the outside. “It looked short notice but it wasn’t at all because I’ve been talking about it with our captain since the Australian Open. A business partner and I are working on bringing the Davis Cup to Germany and of course we had to qualify first,” the 24-year-old reported. The Hamburg player won both his matches in Brazil and thus played a major role in the German team’s entry into the group phase.
Exchange with Piqué
With Gerard Piqué, who in addition to his active career as a professional footballer with FC Barcelona as an investor decides the fate of the traditional tennis team competition, he is in “constant contact, weekly contact, we talk about the business idea and so on and so forth. We have now already made an offer to the Davis Cup team that organises the Davis Cup, and now it’s just a question of whether they accept our offer or not,” said Zverev.
The fact that he had long been a big critic of the new format and refused to play in the Davis Cup is now not seen by Zverev as a contradiction. “I have always said that I am not a huge fan of it. But I’m already a huge fan of what was in Rio now, for example: the away matches, the home matches. I’m a huge fan of that,” he said. The fact that the format is now split up and that everything is no longer played in December at one venue, as was the case last year, “is already a huge step in the right direction. That’s why I’m trying to be open minded, especially now when I can be a part of the event and we can play as a German team in Germany,” Zverev said. “It would be a huge highlight for me to be able to play in Hamburg and I think it’s just a good idea. “
