Cam Norrie<\/a> sealed the opening win for Great Britain, overcoming a gutsy performance from Poland\u2019s Tomasz Berkieta to win 7-6(9), 6-4.<\/p>\nNorrie showed his quality to come through in an hour and 40 minutes and get his first Davis Cup win since 2023.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s nice to be back playing for my country,\u201d Norrie said. \u201cIt\u2019s my first time here. Tomasz is a young up-and-coming player, he\u2019s very talented, got a big serve and hits the ball very well off both sides. I knew it wasn\u2019t going to be easy, not much rhythm \u2013 he played really well today and challenged me.\u201d<\/p>\n
The 30-year-old came closest to breaking in the first set, leading 5-4 with deuce on the 2024 Roland Garros finalists\u2019 serve. However, Berkieta kept his nerve to confidently slap a forehand winner past Norrie to clinch the game before eventually forcing a tie-break.<\/p>\n
The Briton had to stare down two set points at 6-4 in the tie-break but Berkieta went too big on his shots in crucial moments \u2013 making key errors off both wings.<\/p>\n
Norrie continued to battle and used experience to his advantage and the pressure told. At 9-9, the Pole hit a double fault and on his fourth set point Norrie hit big lefty out-swinging serve to clinch the set after an hour.<\/p>\n
Eager to stay on the front foot, Norrie got the first break of the match early in the second set. A rather deflated looking Berkieta left an easy volley only for it to drop in before making another costly mistake on break point.<\/p>\n
Berkieta had a break back point with Norrie trying to serve out match but couldn\u2019t make it count as Norrie\u2019s third ace helped wrap up a hard fought win for his country.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Match draw & schedule Match day one Friday 12 September (Start: 16:00 BST) Cam Norrie (GBR)\u00a0bt. Tomasz Berkieta…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":152119,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[99,428],"class_list":{"0":"post-152118","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tennis","8":"tag-sports","9":"tag-tennis"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152118","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=152118"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152118\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/152119"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=152118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=152118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=152118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}