Ireland counting on home advantage

Tennis Davis Cup: Matt Doyle sat onto a stool in Fitzwilliam Tennis Club yesterday and a microphone was thrust into his hand. He was asked to tell the story of how he'd beaten the then world number 15, Eliot Telscher, in Ireland's 1983 Davis Cup match against America.

Doyle doesn't do dead serious. But he does do dead serious self-deprecation and delightfully lets genies out of bottles.

"Well," said Doyle. "I'd like to remember the match as Séan (Sorensen, his Davis Cup team-mate) has described, but the fact of the matter is I beat Telscher because the American team were poisoned in a South Dublin restaurant the night before.

"Telscher couldn't move on court, couldn't hit the ball. The bill at the restaurant came to around four thousand, two hundred, and it was Irish pounds and all they got was food poisoning. I'll tell you, for that sort money these days you'd get a decent meal in Shanahans on the Green."

As he, Sorensen, Jim McArdle and Peter Minnis gathered to celebrate the 21st anniversary of facing the John McEnroe-led US Davis Cup team in the RDS, the current Irish team were preparing to step up today to face Hungary in the home leg of their Davis Cup match in Fitzwilliam.

The Sorensen lineage remains strong, and over the weekend his 23-year-old son, Kevin, the Irish number two, lines out with number one Peter Clarke, David Mullins and the venerable Eoin Collins in their Europe/Africa Group two match, or, division two of the competition.

Promotion this year is a long shot, but against Hungary on a very fast Fitzwilliam surface, Ireland, over the next three days, give themselves a chance. Ravaged by injury and unavailability of players, Collins, who will be 36 in July, and 23-year-old Mullins will play an important supporting role to Clarke and Sorensen.

Home advantage and the fact that the Hungarians play most of their tennis on the much slower clay surface leads to a certain degree of optimism. The last time the teams met was around six years ago in Budapest. Clay then was more foreign than it is now to Irish players and the Irish team went down 4-1.

Clarke, who opens the match against Gergely Kisgyorgy today at 4 p.m., had some encouraging results last year and was as close as a match point away from qualifying for the US Open main draw in September. Injury then hit, but his 303rd-place world ranking is significantly the highest on the Irish team.

"Peter is fine now," says non-playing team captain Owen Casey. "He's done well this week and the whole team have had good practice. The first match is important in that a win would get the crowd into it. But each player is aware of their own duty.

"It's nice going in second when you're 1-0 up, but they are all professional enough to win their own battles. They've got to do their own thing, although, yeah, a win in the first match would give us some momentum.

"The last time we played them was away on the dirt, I think 1998. Irish teams don't normally do that well on clay. Now it's a different team and it's over here and that makes it a different match."

It is, by necessity, a mixed bunch of players with today's results likely to set the tone for the weekend. Twenty-one years on, with Sorensen, Doyle, Minnis and McArdle in the shadows, who knows?

SCHEDULE - Today: P Clarke v G Kisgyorgy, 4.0, followed by K Sorensen v K Bardoczky. Saturday: D Mullins/E Collins v S Kiss/G Balazs, 2.0. Sunday: P Clarke v K Bardoczky, 1.0, followed by K Sorensen v G Kisgyorgy.