We are flying to Santiago with Teimuraz Gabashvili. Two hours earlier, Marat Safin flew from La Serena, the rest preferred a night bus route to the Chilean capital, from where most of us will have to, with patience, make a 25-hour flight from Santiago - Sao Paulo - Frankfurt - Moscow (pleasure, I must say below) secondary). Frankly, I would love to go with the team, but it hurts to want to spend the extra few hours in Santiago.
Imagine you are sitting in the middle of February at your home in Moscow, looking out the window, and suddenly the phone rings and they offer you: would you like to spend five or six hours in Santiago? Issue price - payment for a hotel room of your choice. Would you refuse? Then immediately throw the newspaper in the trash. We are out of the way.
Why does the team ride the bus? She has such a plan. By the way, Tarpishchev and the company ordered a morning tour of Santiago. But to go with them means to deprive yourself of either sleep or the time necessary to write a note, and this, you know, is an even bigger crime against common sense than refusing to walk around Santiago.
Timur goes to the USA. Next week he plays a tournament in San Jose, as, by the way, and Safin. At the modest airport of La Serena, Timur is asked to pose for photographs by dozens of Chileans. Adrian Garcia, the player of their national team, passes by (the same substitute as Gabashvili), but he receives zero attention. Chileans appreciate the winners and, most importantly, are very fond of famous foreigners. Chileans are hidden from the world behind the walls of the Andes, the Pacific Ocean and strange historical “spots” and adore when someone comes to visit them. On Friday, an elderly Chilean woman came up to me in embarrassment on the street and said that she was a fan of Safin - not against the Chilean team and personally Nicholas Massa, but simply because she knew Marat from the time when she saw on TV his matches with Marcelo Rios, and this Thursday saw him near the stadium "alive."
On Sunday, Safin lost his match to Fernando Gonzalez, but still left Chile as a winner - thanks to Igor Andreev. The new hero of the Russian team today is happy with his and our common victory, and half an hour before the decisive match he was literally pounded with tension (he even thought at one moment to refuse the match with Massa). But Igor dealt with the nerves, then did it again - when, having lost the third set, he allowed the emaciated rival to raise his head for a moment, and to believe in a miracle to the tens of thousands of stands of the stadium in La Serena.
Andreev again missed a few match balls (this time he won from the fifth, and in a Friday match with Gonzalez - from the seventh), but this fact more likely adds to his result. In such a situation, it was possible to flinch.
Igor kept calm and in the fourth installment brought the matter to an end. “I'm happy,” Andreev said immediately after the game. “For the sake of such moments, it’s worth practicing for years, depriving yourself of some pleasure and relaxation.” A little later, when the team gathers on the restaurant’s pre-sunset sunlit terrace in the hospitable La Serena Golf Club, when glasses and glasses with first-class Chilean wine, local Pisco vodka and even the Russian Stolichnaya found in the bins are raised, Shamil Tarpishchev will develop an idea Andreeva: “It's worth living for such moments.”
The Tarpishchev team won the 43rd victory in the Davis Cup matches. By the way, our captain had only six victories left before Neil Fraser's record. Six victories at the current pace is only a year and a half. True, as you know, the most difficult match is the next, in our case, the April quarterfinal in Moscow with the humbled five in-person defeats in a row by the French.
Teimuraz Gabashvili flew off to San Jose. He needs to score points at all costs in order to qualify for American Masters, Miami and Indian Wells without qualification. Marat went there, probably with a more global task: he needs to get into the rhythm of the regular season and prepare for the hard series. Igor Andreev remains in South America: it is now important for him to gain competitive experience, and he will not do this faster than on the ground in Buenos Aires and Mexico City. Tennis is a game of egoists, everyone lives in this world independently, each has his own goals and his own means. But several times a year, tennis players turn into a team. To win matches, defending the honor of the country, and most importantly, to properly learn the word "we". Timur did not play in La Serena, but while we made our way with the police cordon to the airport (of course, we sat at the table and were late for the flight), while we checked in, we selected dried papaya in the threatening to someday turn into a duty-free kiosk while they were sitting on the balcony waiting for boarding, chatting with Adrian Garcia, while they were flying, while the plane was looking for a landing strip on the edge of the sea of Santiago evening lights, Gabashvili probably said the phrase “we won” about fifty times. And this is absolutely true.