Russian tennis chief optimistic about Davis Cup’s match against Belarus in Moscow

The Russian national men’s tennis team has good chances to succeed in beating their opponents from Belarus during their 2018 ATP Davis Cup encounter in Moscow this weekend, the president of the Russian Tennis Federation (RTF) said on Thursday.

The teams from Russia and Belarus are meeting on September 14-15 at the Luzhniki Small Sports Arena in Moscow as part of their Group I relegation play-off. Both teams lost to Austria in the opening rounds of the year and this weekend they will clash to decide who is to remain in the top world group.

"We are anticipating a very interesting encounter," RTF President Shamil Tarpishchev said. "All guys approached professionally to this encounter, they were all on time for the training session and gave it all. The most important now is to show a decent game."

"The team is doing okay today, but everything will depend on their game quality, which we tried to achieve within a relatively short period of time," he said. "We are very optimistic about the upcoming match. We have a very young team and they are all in the elite of the world tennis."

Both teams met previously only once and it was in 2004 during the Davis Cup World Cup’s first round in which Belarus defeated the Russian side.

The Russian squad will include Karen Khachanov, Daniil Medvedev, Andrey Rublev, Evgeny Donskoy and Evgeny Karlovsky, while the Belarus lined up for the upcoming encounter with Russia Ilya Ivashka, Egor Gerasimov, Max Mirnyi, Andrei Vasilevski and Alexander Zgirovsky.