The Turkmenistan men's tennis team achieved a significant victory over the Iraqi team, 3-0, at the Davis Cup zonal tournament taking place in Colombo, Sri Lanka.
In Group IV of the Asia and Oceania zone, in which our compatriots compete, 7 teams are competing, divided into two groups of three and four teams.
Turkmen tennis players are competing in Group «B» along with teams from Iraq, Kyrgyzstan and Kuwait. Group «A» includes representatives from Qatar, the Northern Mariana Islands and Sri Lanka.
In the first two rounds, the teams of Turkmenistan and Iraq lost to the teams of Kuwait and Kyrgyzstan with the same score of 0:3. And therefore, their face-to-face match was of great importance in the fight for 3rd place in the group, which gave the right to play in a play-off match with the third team of Group «A» for the right to remain in Group IV of the Asia and Oceania zone.
It is noteworthy that before this face-to-face match, the teams of Turkmenistan and Iraq had met each other six times in the Davis Cup since 2010. The Turkmen won five of them, and only once – in 2011 – did the Iraqis win with a score of 2:1. Incidentally, the last time these teams met was in 2021 at the Asia-Oceania Group IV zonal tournament in Isa Town, Bahrain. And then the Turkmen tennis players crushed the Iraqi team – 3:0.
The Turkmen team continued its winning streak this time too. Despite the impressive score of 3:0, the victory did not come easy for our tennis players. The opponents spent more than five hours on the court before this match ended. The first three-set singles match was particularly intense and grueling in its duration, in which Resul Atayev broke the resistance of Akam Bakr in 3 hours and 15 minutes – 7:6 (7:5), 1:6, 7:5, and the Turkmenistan team took the lead 1:0. Second winning point of our team was earned by Ali Geldiyev, who beat Mohammed Al-Shammari 6:4, 6:3. Their fight lasted 1 hour and 53 minutes.
In a doubles match that was no longer of great importance, Selim Chagylov and Ali Geldiyev won against Mohammed Al-Shammari and Amin Al-Ubaydi in 1 hour and 4 minutes – 6:3, 6:2.
In the final playoff match of the tournament, the Turkmenistan team will play against the team from the Northern Mariana Islands, which previously lost to representatives of Qatar and Sri Lanka with the same score of 1:2 and took third place in Group «A». The team that wins this match will retain its place in Group IV of the Asia-Oceania zone. The losing team will be relegated to Group V of Asia/Oceania, along with the Iraqi team, which finished fourth in Group «B».
