DIGEST

The Lawn Tennis Association is ready to continue the fight to enable Aljaz Bedene to play for Great Britain in the Davis Cup.

The 26-year-old is barred from representing his adopted country because of a rule introduced in 2015 preventing players from competing for two different nations.

Bedene played three dead rubbers for his native Slovenia between 2010 and 2012. He had hoped the International Tennis Federation board would deem his case exceptional but they upheld the ruling of the Davis Cup Committee.

The LTA lawyer Stephen Farrow, said: “He is definitely keen [to carry on] and we are as well because we really believe in him and we really believe the right and fair thing to do is to enable him to play for Britain.

“He’s got a British passport, he’s just bought a house with his girlfriend, he’s probably going to get married here. This is his country and it has been for a long period of time.

“The last thing we want is to have any more uncertainty hanging over Aljaz. It’s difficult for him to focus on his tennis and we want to try to protect him as much as we can.” Perth’s Eve Muirhead said her los to Swiss skip Binia Feltscher had played on her mind after she crashed out of the World Championships following a 9-4 round-robin defeat to Canada’s Chelsea Carey in Saskatchewan,

The 2013 gold medallist had won seven straight matches before blowing a 5-1 lead against Feltscher, and a further defeat to Japan’s Satsuki Fujisawa left Muirhead needing to beat Carey to advance to the play-offs. The winner-takes-all contest was tense until Carey counted three stones at the fifth end to lead 5-2 and then snuffed out a Scottish fightback with a four at the ninth.

That saw Muirhead finish fifth overall with seven wins out of 11, and she said: “It’s tough to accept that we’re out, but we lost our last three games, and you just can’t do that at a World Championship. We played well at the start of the week, but the Swiss game has come back to bite us.”

Meanwhile, Edinburgh’s recentlycrowned world junior champion Bruce Mouat made a winning start at the Aberdeen International yesterday. The 21-year-old counted threes at the third and fifth ends on his way to an 8-2 victory over China’s Jialiang Zang.