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The Italian men’s national tennis team won the Davis Cup, the main team tennis competition for national teams, beating Australia in the final: it is the second title in its history, after the one won in 1976.
In the Davis Cup, matches are played as the best of three matches, two singles and a possible doubles play-off match: in the first, hard-fought match, Matteo Arnaldi for Italy beat the Australian Alexei Popyrin; in the second the Italian Jannik Sinner won clearly against Alex De Minaur. There was no need for a play-off in doubles, as had happened to Italy in both the semi-finals and quarter-finals.
The Italian team is managed by Filippo Volandri, a former tennis player (best ranking 25th place in 2007) who plays a role similar to that of the coach, who in the Davis Cup is defined as a “non-playing captain”. The players called up by Volandri were Jannik Sinner, the best Italian tennis player around and number 4 in the world ranking, Lorenzo Musetti, Matteo Arnaldi, Lorenzo Sonego and Simone Bolelli.
For tennis, the Davis Cup is the closest thing to what the World Cup is in other sports: it has existed since 1900 and has been played every year since then, with the exception of the years of the world wars and 2020 due to the pandemic. The current format, changed in 2018, includes qualifying phases divided into various days throughout the season and a final phase (from the quarter-finals onwards) in a single venue: this year it was played in Malaga, Spain. Even if it does not give points for the singles and doubles world rankings, the Davis Cup is usually very popular among tennis players and considered one of the most important goals achievable in a career.
Jannik’s world 🤲
The moment Italy became World Champions from court side! #DavisCupFinals | @springtennis pic.twitter.com/TLJBdVm9W1
— Davis Cup (@DavisCup) November 26, 2023
Before Australia, Italy had beaten the Netherlands in the quarter-finals and Serbia in the semi-finals. If Italy started as favorites against the Netherlands and Australia, the most difficult match was the one against Serbia, whose team includes the world number 1 tennis player Novak Djokovic. Against Serbia, Italy had lost the first singles match, the one between Musetti and Miomir Kecmanovic, but had then recovered thanks to a rather unexpected victory by Sinner against Djokovic and the victory of the doubles play-off between the Italian pair Sinner-Sonego and the Serbian one Djokovic-Kecmanovic.
– Read also: The video of Jannik Sinner canceling three consecutive match points against Novak Djokovic in the Davis Cup
For Italy it was the eighth final ever played in the Davis Cup, 25 years after the last one, and it was the fourth against Australia: up until now they had always lost, in 1960, 1961 and 1977. In 1976 however they succeeded to win by beating Chile in the final in Santiago de Chile. At the time the team was led by Nicola Pietrangeli (captain-non-player) and composed of Adriano Panatta, Paolo Bertolucci, Corrado Barazzutti and Antonio Zugarelli.
For some years now, Italian men’s tennis has been in one of the best moments in its history, if not the best ever for the number of tennis players it manages to express at high levels: the victory of the Davis Cup seemed possible and had been for a couple of years now for years a declared objective of the Italian federation, which with Jannik Sinner can boast for the second time in its history a tennis player in fourth place in the world ranking (it had only happened once, with Adriano Panatta in the seventies).
Beyond Sinner, however, over the last 15 years the federation has managed to build one of the most interesting tennis movements in the world, thanks to a plan of investments and targeted interventions which have so far given excellent results. Although it is not going through an equally positive moment, Italian women’s tennis is also achieving important results: last week the national team reached the final of the Billie Jean King Cup, the women’s equivalent of the Davis Cup, losing against Canada.
The most successful generation of Italian women’s tennis, however, remains that of the first two decades of the 2000s, with tennis players of the caliber of Flavia Pennetta, Francesca Schiavone, Sara Errani and Roberta Vinci. Between 2006 and 2013 the Italian women’s team was world champion four times in the Fed Cup (old name of the Billie Jean King Cup).
– Read also: Where did the great moment of Italian tennis come from?