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MÁLAGA, Spain — U.S. Davis Cup captain Bob Bryan knows all about winning at doubles — 16 Grand Slam titles and a recent selection to the International Tennis Hall of Fame make that obvious — yet his decision to make a last-second change to his lineup against Australia on Thursday led to a loss.
With the best-of-three quarterfinal even at 1-1 heading into the deciding doubles match, Bryan opted to switch from an established duo, Paris Olympics silver medalists Austin Krajicek and Rajeev Ram, to a pairing of two singles players, Tommy Paul and Ben Shelton. Paul and Shelton were beaten 6-4, 6-4 by Matthew Ebden and Jordan Thompson, putting the Australians in the semifinals and sending the Americans home, extending their Davis Cup title drought to 17 years.
“We were hoping to catch the Aussies a little bit by surprise,” Bryan said. “We took a shot at it.”
Didn’t work.
“It didn’t surprise us that much, to be honest,” Australian captain Lleyton Hewitt said. “I’d seen [Paul and Shelton] do drills during the week, so, yeah, it wasn’t a surprise.”
The U.S. owns a record 32 championships from the event, but the most recent came in 2007 — when Bryan was a member of the team. The American men haven’t made the Davis Cup semifinals since 2018.
Ebden and Thompson both have claimed Grand Slam doubles titles with other partners. Paul and Shelton both have been to major semifinals in singles, but don’t play a lot of doubles. They only had competed as a team at one ATP tournament, the 2023 Miami Open, where they went 2-1 and exited in the quarterfinals.
Other explanations offered by Bryan for the move included that Ebden is more familiar with the games of Krajicek and Ram — Ebde0n and John Peers beat those two in the Paris Games final in August for the men’s doubles gold — and that Shelton was already in “rhythm out there” because he competed earlier in the day in singles.
Shelton lost that one to Thanasi Kokkinakis 6-1, 4-6, 7-6 (14) after staving off six match points but failing to convert four of his own.
“Heartbreaking, for sure,” Shelton called it.
US Open runner-up Taylor Fritz then won 6-3, 6-4 against Alex de Minaur to pull the Americans even.
It was during the 15 minutes or so after that match on an indoor hard court at the Palacio de Deportes José María Martín Carpena in southern Spain, Bryan said, that the doubles choice was made.
“As a captain, you have to make tough decisions. I had a lot of information behind the decision. We have been here for six days, practicing. We know how everyone is feeling. And we know a lot about the opponents that we’re playing. It’s a world of analytics,” Bryan said. “You talk amongst the other coaches. You talk with the players. … This wasn’t a black-and-white decision. It was razor-thin edge, and we went with it.”
Thursday marked Shelton’s debut in Davis Cup competition.
“To not get a win in one of those two matches,” he said, “hurts pretty bad.”