Andrey Golubev

The latest ATP rankings raise one of the biggest controversies with the points system.

I am of course talking about ranking points for Davis Cup wins, introduced for the first time in 2010.

I can see the logic. Rankings should reflect performances and if a player produces his best in the pressure atmosphere of Davis Cup then that should be rewarded.

Andrey Golubev picking up some points for the central role he played in Kazakhstan’s victory over the Czech Republic doesn’t necessarily seem like a bad idea, for example.

Overall though, the rule is ridiculously flawed. For starters points are only on offer for World Group matches.

China’s Du Wi beats Randy Lu, a player ranked around 340 places above him and gets nothing. Jarkko Nieminen wins two singles matches in Slovenia on his worst surface. Nothing.

Sergiy Stakhovsky played fourteen sets in total, winning epic five setters against Robin Haase and Jesse Huta-Galung. He gets zilch. Gilles Muller drags Luxembourg to a win in Dublin on a surface deliberately designed to neutralise his strengths and…well you get the point.

I could go on and on.

A system that rewards only players from the elite nations is clearly unfair. There’s no debate. What’s more, only the elite players from the elite nations. I don’t see Guillermo Garcia Lopez or Marcel Granollers picking up points any time soon.

Those facts alone should be enough to either abolish or completely reform the points for Davis Cup system.

The logic behind the original decision was ridiculous too. It was presumably to attract the top players to the competition. The type of players who are never going to give a shit about an extra 500 points on offer, in other words.

Anyway back to the rankings. Grigor Dimitrov was the most significant mover with his title in Cherbourg sending him up seven places to a new high of 71.

This was achieved while his compatriots were getting trounced in Belarus without him. I wonder what Bulgarian tennis fans make of his decision to forsake the competition already.

Dimitrov tends to draw a lot of comparisons with Roger Federer. You can now add Davis Cup disdain to the list.

As far as I can see, Dimitrov is the only top 100 player to achieve a new career high this week so we’ll leave it there for this week. Onwards.