Tiley backs United Cup amid criticism

Darren Walton and Anna Harrington | January 3, 2023

Tennis Australia chief Craig Tiley has launched a fierce defence of the United Cup amid grumblings about the fledgling event from players, including the great Rafael Nadal.

Dead rubbers, largely meaningless ties, a convoluted schedule and player withdrawals have led to criticism of the new mixed teams tournament being staged as a key lead-up to the Australian Open.

Nadal’s chief beef was his Spanish outfit being out of the running to advance to the quarter-finals after falling behind 3-1 against Great Britain, rendering the mixed doubles and then five matches against Australia as dead rubbers.

“Putting things in perspective (for) this competition, I find a negative point,” the 22-time grand slam champion said after his upset loss to Australia’s Alex de Minaur in Sydney on Monday night.

“Competition is great. Idea is great. It’s not great that today we are playing for nothing.

“It’s the first year of this competition, so that’s the kind of thing that we need to fix, to improve, and to make it more interesting for everyone.”

However, Tiley insists the event has already been a raging success.

“The United Cup’s absolutely fantastic,” the Australian Open boss said on Tuesday.

“If you watched last night, we’ve had full stadiums, we’ve had over 120,000 people already go through the gate. Yesterday, 40,000 people in one day in Perth, Brisbane and in Sydney.

“That’s remarkable – we’ve never had that. It beats most major tennis events around the world for one day’s attendance.

“So (it is) unbelievably successful, great, positive feedback from the players.” 

Tiley’s glowing endorsement of the United Cup will come as a disappointment to those calling for a return to the traditional summer program of Australian Open lead-in ATP and WTA tournaments in Sydney, Brisbane and Adelaide.

But he did concede some tweaking may happen, and it is understood making the mixed doubles matches guaranteed live rubbers next year is already under discussion.

Nadal sat out the mixed doubles against Great Britain after Spain were already doomed, but said he would have played had the rubber been live.

“We’ll do a debrief (on) what can be improved for 2024,” Tiley said.

“It’s important to know that we announced this event five weeks before we started about a five-week run-up to deliver on this event.

“Everyone wanted us to only do it in 2024, and we made a decision to do it in 2023.

“So I’m proud that the team’s pulled together what they pulled together.

“It’s going be a great event. It’s going to finish really strong in the finals in Sydney.”