Bopanna questions change of captain for tie against Pakistan

PUNE: Rohan Bopanna on Tuesday expressed "surprise" and "shock" over All India Tennis Association's (AITA) decision to change the captain of the Indian Davis Cup team while still awaiting the final decision of the International Tennis Federation (ITF) on the venue of the November 29-30 tie against Pakistan.
The AITA named former Davis Cup player and chairman of national selection panel Rohit Rajpal as the captain, replacing Mahesh Bhupathi, on Sunday, a day before the ITF announced its decision to move the tie out of Pakistan.Pakistan, being the host nation, has the right to pick a venue in the next four-five days.
"It surprises me that AITA has changed the captain before ITF announced the final decision yesterday (04.11.19) and where the tie would be held. What shocks me more is that none of the players were asked or even informed that the captain was going to be changed," Bopanna posted on his official twitter handle.

Speaking to TOI, Bopanna said: "When the ITF specifically says Nov 4 (as the day of its decision), why the federation should assume a decision? Why can't they have waited for a day for the decision to come in? It makes everyone's life very easy."
"As a senior player, I would have liked to be told why the captain is being changed, whether it is because the tenure is over or something else," he added. Bopanna clarified that he had no issues with Rajpal becoming the captain of the team.
Paes, Ramkumar set to play
Veteran Leander Paes, whose last Davis Cup appearance was against China last April 2018, is all set to be 'retained' while Ramkumar Ramanathan is back in the fold of the Indian team for the Pakistan tie. Paes had made himself available after some of the players, including Ramkumar, had pulled out expressing concerns over travelling to Islamabad, where the Asia-Oceania Group 1 tie was scheduled to be played. With the ITF deciding to move the tie out of Pakistan to a neutral venue, it was expected that the players picked for the September tie, before it was postponed, would make an automatic comeback.
However, that doesn't seem to be the case with at least some members of the AITA believing that the national body should not turn its back on those who agreed to travel to Pakistan when the first-choice players were not ready to go. AITA secretary Hironmoy Chatterjee refused to give a direct response on the issue.
Bopanna said the players were "always available to play at a neutral venue". "In the initial mail that the players and the captain (Bhupathi) wrote, we had said that we don't want to go to Pakistan for security reasons and were available to play at a neutral venue. That's the only communication we have had with the AITA. The AITA never wrote back," he said. The team will be announced on Nov 9 or 10. Besides Paes and Ramkumar, Saketh Myneni and Sriram Balaji are expected to make the cut.