DEN BOSCH, Netherlands -- Little-known
Dutchman Raemon Sluiter shoved Germany to the brink of Davis Cup
elimination on Friday by crushing David Prinosil 6-1, 6-3, 7-6 in
a Davis Cup quarterfinal match.
|  | | Netherland's Jan Siemerink, right, celebrates with his coach Tjerk Bogstra. Siemerink defeated Germany's Nicolas Kiefer 6-3, 7-6, 3-6, 6-3 to take an early lead. |
Germany, trailing 2-0, must now win Saturday's doubles to
avoid defeat at the hands of a nation they have beaten in all
six previous encounters.
"The very special Davis Cup atmosphere and the fact that
David probably felt much more pressure than I did made it easier
than I had expected," Sluiter,
ranked a modest 101st in the ATP Entry List, said afterward.
Jan Siemerink earlier had used his heavy artillery to down a
clumsy Nicolas Kiefer 6-3, 7-6, 3-6, 6-3.
Sluiter, 22, picked up the baton and, dressed in black with a
matching bandana over his forehead, delighted 9,000 noisy,
orange-clad fans by playing close to perfection in the first two
sets of his match.
Doubles specialist Prinosil, who was playing in place of the
injured Tommy Haas, didn't help himself by spraying four double
faults to squander a 3-1 lead in the third set that eventually
went to a tiebreak.
Edgy Prinosil punched a backhand long to hand Sluiter three match points,
but Sluiter only needed one.
Prinosil, who never really found a way into the game, fired
a return long to lose the tie break 7-3 and bow out after one
hour and 57 minutes.
"I played a very high level of tennis in those first two
sets," Sluiter said after changing into an orange outfit for the
post-match news conference.
Paul Haarhuis and Sjeng Schalken, who form an excellent
doubles pair, could now seal the Netherlands' first victory against the
Germans.
They were expecting to face Prinosil and Jens Knippschild on
Saturday but German captain Carl-Uwe Steeb could decide to bring
in Haas, recovering from an ankle sprain, in a bid to save his
team from an embarrassing defeat.
"We did not fulfill our potential and the Dutch went a
little bit beyond theirs," Steeb said to sum up the first day of
action.
Only once, in a 1962 victory against Czechoslovakia, has
three-time Davis Cup champion Germany turned around a 2-0
deficit.
Once again, Kiefer, who refused to play for Germany for a
while because of a difficult relationship with Boris Becker,
then both the team's manager and a doubles player, failed to
live up to expectations.
Kiefer, ranked 13th in the ATP Champions Race, started in
promising fashion but Siemerink, 30, soon took control.
The towering Dutchman deployed his serve-and-volley game to
the full on a fast synthetic surface to give his team the best
possible start.
"I was very confident and I just concentrated from the first
second to the last," Siemerink said. "When I play that well, I
can beat the top guys.
Few expected the Dutch team could trouble Germany after
former Wimbledon champion Richard Krajicek was forced to pull
out with an elbow injury in the build-up to the game.
"We're not the favorites but crazy things happen in Davis
Cup," said Siemerink. "In this event the rankings and the
records don't count." Send this story to a friend | Most sent stories |
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ALSO SEE
Injured Haas replaced by Prinosil on German squad
Injured Krajicek to miss Davis Cup quarterfinal
Davis Cup results
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