China's Davis Cup head coach Xie Zhao said his boys would fight just as tough as the in-form women's players in weekend's showdown against Pakistan.

The team hosts Pakistan in the Davis Cup Asia/Oceania Zone Group I Play-offs at Beijing Indoor International Tennis Centre and a victory of the best-of-five tie, starting today will keep the country in the eight-team Group I in Asia.

"We had a lot to learn from the girls as they really had a fantastic year," said Xie. "I hope my players could play hard like them in the coming matches, we had a lot to learn from them."

China made it into the Group I after beating Indonesia 4-1 in 2005 but suffered two crashing losses to Japan (5-0) and Uzbekistan (3-1), which all but pushes China on the verge of the relegation.

"We are very close to each other so it must be a very tough competition for us," said Xie.

Leading the Chinese team is Wang Yu, who is at No 485 on the ATP Rankings and Sun Peng, at 646. National champion Zeng Shaoxuan and Yu Xinyuan, who reached the semi-finals at the doubles event of China Open last week, plays doubles.

The 441-ranked Aisam Qureshi is the No 1 player for Pakistan and Aqeel Khan (504) steps up as the seccond singles, who will also team up with Asim Shafik for the doubles. China, which had 25 wins in 64 Davis Cup ties in history, led the head-to-head record with 3-1 but lost to Pakistan in their only meet since 2000.

The best performance of Pakistan was in 2005 when the team entered the World Group Play-offs, but were thrashed by Chile 5-0. This time the players are much more confident.

"I am looking forward to the match. We should win it," said Pakistan captain Rashid Malik.

The peak period of China's men's tennis came in the early 1990s when Pan Bing was ranked 180th in the world rankings, the best ever for Chinese male player. Xia Jiaping had previously been ranked 235.

The singles gold medal won by Pan at the Beijing Asian Games in 1990, was seen as the swansong for the team.

Coming into 2000, Chinese men's players had nothing of note as they spend most of their time at the International Tennis Federation (ITF) Futures, the lowest-level international tournaments and played only two ATP tournaments in average due to ranking gap.

Wang kept the best rankings in the current national team with a modest 399th last year.

(China Daily September 22, 2006)