Qualification for the Wheelchair Tennis Team World Championship starts this Monday, May 10th, at Vilamoura Tennis & Padel Academy. Portugal is part of group B and has Fábio Reis, resident in the Algarve, on the team.
For the fourth consecutive year, Vilamoura will host this qualification, but this year, with a big news: in 2021, teams from various continents will gather in the Algarve region for a global qualification, not just continental.
Organized by Premier Sports and the Portuguese Tennis Federation, the tournament runs until Thursday, May 13, and will decide the final spots for the BNP Paribas World Team Cup Finals, in Sardinia (Italy), in October.
The men's qualification consists of two teams to be eliminated with 10 teams each, from which the four finalists will go to the final stage of the World Cup.
The Portuguese national team is formed by Jean Paul Mélo, Carlos Leitão and newcomers João Couceiro and Fábio Reis, whose story of overcoming the Sul Informação already told.
Joaquim Nunes is the captain and national selection, having already defined as a goal for the next few days «the same intention to obtain a classification in the middle of the European qualification, with the exact notion of the difficulties in fulfilling that goal».
In 2021 there is a «record of participations» in the qualification for the World Cup, which, according to the national coordinator of the sport, «increases the coefficient of difficulty of the race, which, compared to the previous ones, is already the most competitive stage'.
The draw, held this Sunday, placed Portugal in Group B, along with Austria, Germany, Kenya, Costa Rica, Belarus, Guatemala, Australia, Romania and Chile. The home team had a bye in the first round and compete in the quarter-finals of the knockout stage against Austria, one of the most dangerous teams, not before 14 pm on Monday.
In Group A of the men's tournament are Israel, Hungary, Sri Lanka, Mexico, Croatia, Tanzania, Denmark, Greece, Slovakia and Poland.
The women's qualification also qualifies four countries and takes place in a similar format, but as it has 11 countries it is composed of only one table to be eliminated. Russia (which won in Vilamoura in 2019), Brazil and France start out as the favorite teams, while on the African continent it is Kenya who gathers the most attention, thanks to the victories in the qualification phases of 2014, 2017 and 2018.
In addition to extending the qualification phase to several continents, this year's edition, in Vilamoura, has another novelty: the introduction of a qualification in quad, a category reserved for athletes with upper limb limitations. Netherlands (the undisputed favorite, with two world top 6 players) and Turkey are in Group 1, while Brazil, Sweden and Germany are in Group 2. The respective winners are in the final.
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