Issue link: http://itf.uberflip.com/i/193236
DAVIS CUP BY BNP PARIBAS The Czech team celebrate their return to the final That sent Canada into the final day 2-1 up, but after Djokovic had beaten a slightly hindered Raonic (he had turned his ankle against Tipsarevic on Friday and could do very little court work on Saturday), Tipsarevic started favourite against Pospisil, the one man of the eight to play on all three days. In the end, Tipsarevic's relative freshness and vastly greater experience told, but not before Pospisil had staged an impressive comeback in the third set. The man from Vancouver made good a 2-5 deficit in the third set, and then saved four match points from 2-6 adrift in the tiebreak as Tipsarevic's nerves came to the fore. Had he won the breaker, he might have got into the Serb's head and gone on to win, but the already exhausted Pospisil further aggravated the ankle he had injured in the opening set in diving for a volley on Tipsarevic's fifth match point. The Serb was able to scramble the ball into the open court to seal victory. It had been known since late Saturday afternoon that the winners in Belgrade would be home to the Czechs in the final. At the draw in Prague, Argentina's Juan Monaco had promised 18 ITFWORLD AUTUMN 2013 that Argentina would fight for every point. His team was as good as his word, but Monaco's form was not at the level it was when Argentina reached the 2011 final, there was no Nalbandian to call on, and while Leonardo Mayer took a set off Tomas Berdych — and should perhaps have been two sets up after getting the better of the first few games of the match — Argentina never seemed able to trouble a Czech pair riding the crest of the wave of their country's phenomenal success in Davis and Fed Cup. In retrospect, Radek Stepanek's straight-sets victory over Monaco in the opening rubber decided the tie. Stepanek defied his nearly 35 years, looking sprightly as Monaco was outplayed. Berdych was always favourite to beat Mayer, and Berdych and Stepanek had won 12 out of 13 Davis Cup doubles. They made that 13 out of 14 with an emphatic win against Carlos Berlocq and Horacio Zeballos, to send the Czechs into their third final in five years. If anyone had wondered at the start of the year whether the Czech Republic would still have the Davis Cup hunger having won the title in 2012, this victory crushed any such doubts.