Zim to host ITF Futures tourneys

Ellina Mhlanga Sports Reporter
DAVIS Cup team member Mark Fynn is set to lead the Zimbabwean players when the nation hosts two International Tennis Federation Futures events at Harare Sports Club next week.
The first event is set to run from October 13 to 18 while the second tournament will run from October 20 to 25.

Earlier, there were indications that most of the players that made up the Davis Cup team – Fynn, Tinotenda Chanakira, Benjamin Lock and Takanyi Garanganga – were likely to participate.

But only Fynn made it into the main draw while Chanakira will have to battle it out in the qualifying draw together with Tinashe Chikanda, Miracle Matanga and Luca Picci to go through to the main event.

Entries to the tournament closed on September 25 and this means Garanganga and Lock will not be available for the event.

Tennis Zimbabwe president Regis Bhunu said everything was in place but most of the players will go through the qualifying draw.

“We are having a full list, apparently what happened in 2012, we fielded a number of Zimbabwean players as wild cards but we had some automatically qualifying but because of the strong field available this year the number of those who automatically qualified has gone down.

“We have wild cards in the main draw and in the qualifiers. We expect more of our players to be playing in the qualifiers,” said Bhunu.

The TZ president said they were looking forward to a bigger and better event from the previous competition held in 2012.

“Definitely, when you do something for the second time you would have learnt some lessons so I think in terms of organisation we are better now.

“And in terms of player profile we expect more new players. When we had the first one there was a lot of negative publicity regarding Zimbabwe but we still managed to draw players from other countries.

“We are running US$15 000 tournaments, last time we had a US$10 000 event. For players it’s not so much about the money, a US$15 000 tournament has more points and at this level of competition players are mainly looking for points.”

The tournaments will feature players from countries such as France, the Netherlands, Japan and South Africa.