BILLIE JEAN KING CUP

November 8, 2022

Matej Liptak

Viktoria Kuzmova

Tereza Mihalikova

Team Slovakia

Emirates Arena

Recorded Interview

KUZMOVA-MIHALIKOVA/Perez-Sanders

2-6, 6-3, 10-6

Team Australia - 2

Team Slovakia - 1

Q. So Matej, you lost 2-1. What can you say about this tie against Australia?

CAPTAIN LIPTAK: I mean, we were going into this tie that every match is really open, but I can just say that the Australian girls in singles, they really played good matches and they deserve the victory, I think, because they played, for me, really good performances.

What can I say? Doubles was also really open, and I'm happy that we make one point in this one, because maybe it can give us some little more energy tomorrow, because it's different when you lose 3-0 and you go next day to play. And if you win the last match in the day, it's something better, for sure.

I hope that for the girls it's something like that they can have a little more confident tomorrow. We will see what will happen.

Q. Were you surprised with the level of the Australians, or were you expecting them to be this tough?

CAPTAIN LIPTAK: Yeah, I expected that they play good. They are good players. So I expected.

But they really make good job like at the moment. So that's what I thought. Yeah, it was really good matches, and they deserved the victory today.

Q. One for Tereza. How important was for Slovakia to at least get one point ahead of the match against Belgium, especially knowing that with round robin, anything can happen even after losing?

TEREZA MIHALIKOVA: Sorry, I forgot what you asked.

THE MODERATOR: How important was for you to get one point for Slovakia and lose only 2-1 and not 3-Love?

TEREZA MIHALIKOVA: It goes to confidence also that we got this point, and that we can also count, we can win the deciding doubles. But also last year we didn't advance to semifinal because of one set. So we know very good that every point, every set, every match counts. We went to this match like this.

Also, we lost the first set, we knew we can still win. We did some change. And it worked, so we are happy we got the point.

Tomorrow we give it all. We have nothing to lose. We will cheer the team a lot, and we want to win.