The Fed Cup final takes place in Cagliari this weekend with hosts Italy huge favourites to beat a below-strength Russia team.

The build-up to the two-day contest has been dominated by reaction to the naming of a Russia team last week that features not a single one of their 11 top-ranked players.

Instead, world number 136 Alexandra Panova is the highest-ranked of the quartet, which also includes Alisa Kleybanova, ranked 183rd, and teenagers Irina Khromacheva and Margarita Gasparyan.

In contrast, Italy’s team is the strongest it could be, led by seventh-ranked Sara Errani and number 13 Roberta Vinci – who are also the world’s number one doubles pair.

The Russian absentees have varying reasons for not wanting to be in Sardinia.

Leading Russian Maria Sharapova has been sidelined since August with a shoulder problem while number four Ekaterina Makarova did not want to risk a wrist injury.

Relations with the Russian Federation have reportedly been a factor for other players, but the biggest problem is that the Fed Cup final clashes with the WTA’s Tournament of Champions in Sofia.

Maria Kirilenko, Elena Vesnina and Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova, all among the top six Russians, opted to play in Bulgaria instead.

The lure of points and prize money at the tour’s second-tier end-of-year championships proved too appealing, although Kirilenko’s protestations of injury were borne out when she retired early in her first match.

Vinci could also have chosen to play in Sofia but decided after considerable thought to represent her country instead.

Kleybanova is undoubtedly a better player than her ranking suggests having been in the top 20 before her diagnosis with the cancer Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2011.

She said: “Our team is pretty positive. We shouldn’t be upset by a bad day.

“We have to be happy: we’re playing tennis, we’re playing for our country... we’re proud of it. Everything is very good.”

Coach’s message

Russia Fed Cup coach Anastasia Myskina, twice a winner of the competition as a player, has sympathy with the missing players.

“It was their decisions and I could understand Kirilenko has been hurt the past two years and Elena wants to be in the top 20, so good luck,” she said.

“But, for me, Fed Cup was always in first place no matter how much I was playing.”

At the heart of the problem is that the Fed Cup is run by the International Tennis Federation and the Tournament of Champions by the WTA.

It is the ITF that has chosen to back away from the clash, announcing on Thursday after a meeting of its Fed Cup committee that the final would be moved back a weekend from next year.

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