Davis Cup: Guillermo Coria announced that the Argentine team will receive Kazakhstan, with a fundamental change

Guillermo Coriacaptain of the Argentine team competing in Davis CupThe five tennis players called up for the series against have been confirmed Kazakhstan at the Jockey Club of Rosario on 3 and 4 February: the singles Francisco Cerúndolo, Sebastiano Baez AND Tomas Etcheverryand double players Horace Zeballos AND Massimo González They will be the men who will seek promotion to the finals of the competition.

The team’s base is similar to the one against which they achieved victory Lithuania 4-0 in September in Buenos Aires and I’ve reached this point. That series began with the triumphs of Cerúndolo (21st in the ATP ranking) and Báez (28th). The pair of Máximo González and Andrés Molteni, one of the eight best pairs of the 2023 season, got the decisive point and then Etcheverry (30th) won on his Davis Cup debut.

For the series against Kazakhstan, the only change will occur in doubles: Horacio Zeballos (fifth in the ranking of that specialty) will replace Molteni. This will once again form a duo that has played seven series since 2018, in which it recorded five wins and two defeats.

“In this series we evoke Horacio Zeballos for two reasons. Firstly because he has to play a series to meet the organization’s requirements and be eligible for the Olympic Games. In this way the three (Zeballos, González and Molteni) have the same chances of being in Paris. Besides that, Horacio obviously deserves it because he is fifth in the world, he has achieved incredible results, with a Masters final, and he knows Machi a lot,” Coria justified his decision to him.

For several seasons Zeballos has played on the ATP circuit exclusively in doubles in the company of the Spaniard Marcel Granollers. Together they formed one of the best duets in the world. This year they were finalists at Wimbledon and the ATP Finals and won the Shanghai Masters 1000. The 38-year-old from Mar del Plata has 20 ATP titles to his credit, including 6 Masters 1000, in addition to the 3 Grand Slam tournament finals played .

Máximo González has also concentrated his activity on the circuit exclusively on doubles. In 2023, the 40-year-old from Tandil, together with Andrés Molteni, won five ATP titles (they were one of three couples who celebrated multiple championships) and also competed in the ATP Finals (they fell in the group stage).

As for singles, the results obtained in the last months of last season, after the series against Lithuania in September, were not optimal. Cerúndolo reached the round of 16 at the Masters 1000 in Shanghai and Paris (on his way he beat the Norwegian Casper Ruud, eighth in the ATP ranking), but also fell in the first round at the ATP 500 in Tokyo and Vienna. This week he began his competitive year with the defeat against the Spaniard Roberto Bautista Agut (57th) in the round of 16 of the ATP 250 in Hong Kong.

For his part, Báez has failed to achieve more than one victory in the last six tournaments of 2023 and in four of them he fell on his debut. In any case, this did not overshadow a season in which he won three titles (Córdoba, Kitzbuhel and Winston-Salem) and entered the top 30 in the world for the first time. This week he lost to Slovakia’s Lukas Klein in the first round of the ATP 250 in Brisbane.

Etcheverry, after his debut in Davis, recorded his best results at the ATP 500 in Basel and at the ATP 250 in Zhuhai, where he reached the quarter-finals, while at the ATP 500 in Beijing he fell in the round of 16. In Basel he achieved two of the best victories of his career: he beat the American Sebastian Korda (23rd) and the Scot Andy Murray (40th and former world number one).