With India’s recent Davis Cup triumph against Chinese Taipei coming without the experience of leander Paes and Mahesh Bhupathi, the country’s numero uno singles player Somdev Devvarman feels it is time that the focus shifts from the veteran duo to the youngsters, he said during an interview. Excerpts
The best thing in this tie was team camaraderie. Isn’t it good to not have groups in the Indian Davis Cup team. leander or Mahesh not being thereIJ
let’s not focus on leander and Mahesh. let’s focus on the youngsters. Jeevan asked 15 times during and before and after my match what I need. And he knows I will do the same when he will play. So we are all here helping out each other. I think the focus should not be there on leander or Mahesh. The focus should be on the group of guys who are here. The focus should be on the new captain. Because this is the future. We appreciate everything they have given us but now we need to move on. Mahesh has said he is done this year. leander is a fantastic player, unfortunately he is not available for national duty this year but we will just go ahead. No matter, who is there or not there. We will try to make the best of whatever we have.
Your game has always been of retrieving the ball and wearing out the opponent in long rallies. But there has been this criticism that you play defensive and it does not work against somebody who is going broke. How willing you are to tweak your game for better resultsIJ
Sport in general works a lot on momentum. When things are not going well for you, everything goes against you and when things are going for you, everything looks great. Sometimes when there is lack of self-belief, then little things, like you said defense not working, come but when there is self-belief suddenly those things turn around really fast and you ask a different set of questions. In my experience, all it takes is a few matches for anything to swing things either way in terms of results.
Going back to last month, you left Chennai an unhappy man and there was more than one reason. First, it was defeat against Ramkumar Ramanthan. Could you make out why you lostIJ
It was my first match of the season and he had played some 20 odd matches in November-December. So, he was definitely more match sharp than me. One thing we have got to do as seniors, we have to give credit the youngsters when they deserve it. For me, I did not play a great match and he did. As a professional you move on. You know it is one tournament and you have 30 more in the year. It’s not something I am worried about. But at the same time I will try avoid that in future.
Second thing was that you were unhappy with the organisers, you did not get a doubles wild cardIJ
My agreement with the organisers is that everything will be in confidentiality and I don’t want to break that. If they have broken that it, that’s not my concern. We have sorted those differences and it is okay.