A tea and biscuit budget for the LTA

As Great Britain attempt to avoid a fifth straight Davis Cup defeat, Mark Hodgkinson in The Telegraph looks at the vast gulf between the nation who hosts Wimbledon and their opponents Lithuania.

The facility is named after an American player and libertine of Lithuanian ancestry who drove a yellow convertible Rolls-Royce, partied at New York's Studio 54, snorted cocaine and died of carbon monoxide poisoning.

For John Lloyd, Great Britain's Davis Cup captain, one of his happiest memories of Gerulaitis was the time when they left Studio 54 together at four or five in the morning, when the sun was coming up over Manhattan, and they drove away in that convertible with the top down and the girls screaming.

And yet this weekend could bring about an unfortunate link between Lloyd and Gerulaitis, if events go against the Briton at a centre filled with photographs of Vitas, plus a pair of his old shorts, a shirt and a graphite racket.

If Britain lose this tie in Group Two of the Euro-African Zone, the third division of the competition, it will be Lloyd's fifth successive defeat, and he understands that might mean "my time could be up".

It would also put Britain into a relegation play-off against Ireland or Turkey the weekend after Wimbledon, and if they lose that too, they would be as low as you could go in the Davis Cup, down with tennis superpowers such as Albania, Andorra, Armenia, Malta, Moldova and San Marino.

Since Tim Henman retired in 2007, Lloyd's team have failed to win a tie, but this could be the excruciating weekend when Britain, a grand slam nation and one of the founders of the Davis Cup, starts to disappear off the tennis map.

Those who follow tennis only from their sofas for two weeks of the year are wondering how a nation that stages the Wimbledon Championships, whose governing body has an annual budget in excess of £30 million, could find itself playing and possibly losing against a country such as Lithuania, whose tennis federation has to get by on around £90,000 a year.

This is a moment to consider the fact that Britain's Lawn Tennis Association spent around half a million last year on free lunches for its players, coaches, visitors and administrators at the national tennis centre in London: the Lithuanians would probably struggle to cover the LTA's bill for tea and digestives.

And yet there is a horrible possibility that Britain could lose this tie, as, in the absence of Andy Murray, who decided to sit it out, this is the most inexperienced British team in history.

Not one of the British players has won a Davis Cup rubber, and only doubles player Colin Fleming has won a set. Singles player James Ward and doubles specialist Ken Skupski will be making their first appearances.

Britain will not even have the highest ranked player at the indoor hard court. That will be Ricardas Berankis, who was the junior world No 1, who won the boys' title at the 2007 US Open, and who broke into the top 200 of the men's game after last month reaching the quarter-finals of a tournament in San Jose in California.