To play, or not to play? With all apologies to the Bard, that really is the question, and more than we can ever know.
For most of us, the sight of a player or an athlete on a pitch or a start line is taken as a clean bill of health. We take it for granted that the person performing in front of us, or in technicolour on TV, is fully fit. Shades of grey, or the lingering black cloud of injury, rarely enter our heads.
The weekend just gone showed how blind we can be.
Lindsey Vonn’s crash in the Winter Olympics made armchair experts of us all, some saying she should never have gone up on that piste in the first place, less than two weeks after rupturing an ACL, others insisting it was down to just the clipping of a pole.
Stay closer to home and we had Tipperary manager Liam Cahill criticising the GAA for “talking out of both sides of our mouth” when it comes to player welfare at a time of year where so many are asked to double up between league and the colleges.
Cahill made his point on Saturday, 100km south of the UL Arena where Michael Agwi had just lost Ireland’s opening Davis Cup Group II relegation playoff game to Syria’s Hazem Naw. It was Agwi’s first competitive tennis in ten weeks because of a calf issue.
On Sunday, he fell short of Taym Al Azmeh, again in two sets, as he struggled for the sort of form that had set this place alight against Austria back in 2024, and in subsequent Davis Cup ties in Abbotstown and in Carrickmines.
“In the last two months I just practised three weeks. I started to practise again last week and that’s not a lot of time. I started also too soon because I didn’t feel anything with my calf and [when] I started to practise I felt the pain again and I needed a week break. I couldn’t start proper with my practise.
“The first days it was difficult. I was landing with the split step on my right foot instead of my left foot. It was in my head still. It might still be there, but there is also a lot of excuses. You can always be better. The mentality is the most important thing. If I was stronger I could have done better today.”
It was an impressively forthright take from the 22-year old who, by then, had already apologised to the crowd in an on-court interview after a 6-1 6-4 loss where he had belatedly found just a scintilla of the game everyone knows he has got.
Ireland captain Conor Niland had five players at his disposal this weekend. Conor Gannon and Charlie Barry played and lost a brilliant doubles game in a final set tie break on day two, while Peter Buldorini won his Saturday singles despite major cramp problems.
The other player on the home roster was Ammar Elamin who got his go in the dead rubber on Sunday evening after Agwi’s second loss left Ireland 3-1 in arrears and unable to take the tie. Elamin saw off Yacoub Makzoume in straight sets.
Niland said later that Agwi’s match fitness had been a topic of conversation, beforehand and again on Sunday morning. Ultimately, the decision was that he was physically fit and it was worth seeing if their best player could hit the ground running.
“He’s got the kind of game style where, if he got confident he could get something going, but unfortunately it didn’t happen,” said the team captain.
If it was only natural for Niland to back his No.1 then Agwi was always likely to see it through a similar lens. This was the Davis Cup. The man himself lists his duel with former US Open champion Dominic Thiem here two years ago as the game that rekindled his love for tennis.
And he had suffered for Ireland before, travelling all the way to Barbados in 2022 as a non-playing reserve, missing a tie with El Salvador with injury a year later and then losing narrowly in Peru after a bout of poisoning and a few hours’ sleep.
Pulling out here, in spite of recent injury, was always going to go against an athlete’s nature.
“I was also speaking with my coach in Germany about what was a difficult situation because it is kind of the first tournament of the year. Normally everybody is coming with two or three games [played] in some countries and they have played a lot of matches already.
“That was just my first match of the year and it is already February so it’s kind of difficult. It is also some responsibility that I have. Can I even perform or not? It was also a situation and a decision to let someone else play. Yeah, it’s a tough one.”
Now isn’t the time to overthink that.
It’s just over a year since the Dublin-born, Berlin-based player sat 407th in the ATP rankings. Now he has snaked down to 673 and looking to climb back up that ladder, starting with his first ITF tournament of the year, in Munich, on Wednesday.
As for Ireland, relegation here marks a major disappointment but it is worth mentioning that the average age of the five-man team was just 22.6. Barry, at 24, and with just one year on the pro tour to his name, was the eldest at 24.
“It’s a disappointment but if you go down you can go higher up and that is coming, for sure, I believe that,” said Agwi. “I think we are going to be soon back again in Group II playoff, or in Group I hopefully, and we are going to grow in the next few weeks, months and years.
“There is also a good future in Ireland with the Juniors and the team is going to be really strong in the future. It looks good, that’s for sure. We don’t look that we are in Group II. We are looking forward to being again in Group II.”
