Davis Cup game zone
(5pm GMT) TV BBC red button and website. Despite 88-place advantage in the rankings, Evans will need to be at his best to stop Pospisil bullying him with huge serves and forehands. The key shot could be Evans’s slice to Pospisil backhand. (15 mins after Evans match) Edmund needs to bounce back after Pospisil loss. Shapovalov has the ability to hit spectacular winners with his swinging lefty-serve and single-handed backhand but the 17-year-old’s inexperience may be key. wouldn’t be intelligent for the big picture. If I don’t have pain tomorrow I will play.”
Despite the odd wild moment – including a serve which caromed off Pospisil’s back in the penultimate game – Nestor should be an inspiration to weekend warriors everywhere. This was his 50th Davis Cup tie, at the age of 44, and he received one of the most generous appreciations of his career before the match – a standing ovation from most of the 6,000-odd fans squeezed into the TD Place Arena.
At 44, Nestor delivered an unconventional look on court, with a pair of compression socks stretched up almost to the knees, a baggy pair of shorts and a skin-tight white T-shirt. It is now a full quarter-century since he made the most auspicious of Davis Cup debuts, as a 19-year-old serve-volleyer who took out world No 1 Stefan Edberg in his first singles match. His lefty forehand is still deadly, both when he smacks it and when he takes the pace off to find a short angle. But he also identified that early set point on Inglot’s serve, which he met with a weak backhand return, as a turning point.
Asked whether it was frustrating to think that Inglot had been only a couple of millimetres from a double-fault, Nestor replied: “As a professional athlete, you’re not thinking about winning in that way, via a bad mistake from your opponents. I’m thinking about what I could have done better. The next serve, he went to the backhand and that surprised me. I didn’t get a good hit on it. We win the first set, maybe we get rolling.
“I’m frustrated because I didn’t make enough returns on big points, but they’re a tough team and they were better than us.”