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Nick Kyrgios shall be a conspicuous absence attributable to a qualifying technicality as Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal headline the sphere at subsequent month’s ATP Cup in Melbourne.
A dozen international locations, together with Australia, who shall be spearheaded by Alex de Minaur, will compete within the males’s group match from 1-5 February.
The inaugural occasion was performed final 12 months in Brisbane, Perth and Sydney and received by Djokovic’s Serbia over Nadal’s Spain, with the world’s high two-ranked gamers squaring off within the closing.
As a consequence of Covid-19, this 12 months’s complete match shall be staged at Melbourne Park alongside two WTA 500 and two ATP 250 occasions the week earlier than the Australian Open.
The draw will happen on 20 January, when the 12 groups shall be divided into 4 teams of three for group-stage round-robin play, with every tie consisting of two singles matches and a doubles encounter.
The 4 group winners will advance to the semi-finals.
Qualification for the 2021 ATP Cup is predicated on the ATP rating of every nation’s top-ranked singles participant, whereas Australia qualifies by advantage of a host-nation wildcard.
De Minaur leads the native line-up that made the semi-finals final 12 months and shall be joined by John Millman, John Friends and Luke Saville. Davis Cup skipper Lleyton Hewitt will as soon as once more captain Australia.
However Kyrgios, regardless of being a hero of final 12 months’s marketing campaign, is not going to participate as a result of his 11-month absence from the ATP Tour has seen him slip to world No 46. There are solely two singles slots, that are stuffed by the 2 highest-ranked gamers from every nation – Twenty third-ranked de Minaur and Thirty eighth-ranked Millman.
Kyrgios, a two-time grand slam quarter-finalist, downed big-hitting German Jan-Lennard Struff, Brit Cameron Norrie and Greece’s world No 6 Stefanos Tsitsipas in successive singles victories en path to the semi-finals.
But it surely was his impressed show partnering de Minaur in a rousing 18-16 third-set super-tiebreak doubles win over Brits Jamie Murray and Joe Salisbury that raised the brand new roof at Sydney’s Ken Rosewall Area and clinched Australia a last-four berth.
Kyrgios parlayed his sturdy ATP Cup type right into a fourth-round run on the 2020 Open, lastly falling in a four-set thriller to Nadal.
This 12 months he’ll as a substitute play one of many ATP 250 occasions in Melbourne for some priceless match apply forward of the Open.
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