Former world No.4 talks to Hugh MacDonald about whispers of a comeback and Great Britain�s Davis Cup outlook. The truth is that he has never left. The former world No.4 only retired from the tournament as a player a year ago.

The scuttlebutt is that Greg Rusedski is considering a return to Davis Cup tennis. The truth is that he has never left. The former world No.4 only retired from the tournament as a player a year ago. He has spent much of the time since preparing himself as a coach to the team that finished a creditable 10th in the Junior Davis Cup in Mexico.

The odds on the 35-year-old returning as a player must be long. There is one certainty, though. Rusedski is dedicated to building a Great Britain tennis force. It may be a long way back at the top level. Austria have condemned Team GB to the wilderness of the Europe/Africa Zone and a forthcoming tie with Ukraine. Andy Murray, the current world No.4, does not constitute either a Davis Cup team or the signs of a general improvement in the state of the game in these islands.

Rusedski was straightforward on the path ahead for British tennis. "Right now we need to find more people to play Davis Cup. We need to have a strong team. If you are going to win the Davis Cup then you need five players in the top 100 and you need a team," he said of the immediate future.

"The five-to-seven-year goal is that you want to get the kids on the edge of getting into the top 100 and maximising what they have. I'm working a little bit with George Morgan at the moment, trying to help his scheduling, and with Ashley Hewitt and James Marsalek all Junior Davis Cup players and I'm trying to give them the realisation of what it takes."

He added, though: "It's important that we don't change the system because we've always had the system changing every five years. It's about having continuity."

Rusedski wants to be a part of that future. He is also a commentator on the tour, but said: "I've got the right combination at the moment."

Stressing that he had retired from tennis, not from life, he said: "You go out and you find the things you want to do, try everything and you give your best to it. I always try to give 100% and we'll see what happens."

There may be some surprise that Rusedski, an elite player, should have come into coaching at such a minor level as the under-16 boys, but he said: "I wanted to learn my craft properly and the best way to learn your craft properly is to start from the bottom."

He has strong views on how a player can, indeed must, improve. "Talent is a word which is over-rated," he said. "There are many different kinds of talent. Mental talent is one of the key aspects. You have to love to compete; you have to be a person that wants to win no matter what you are doing. You have to have that attitude whether you are playing cards, whether you are playing tennis or whether you are playing football. You have to be very positive and very competitive.

"If you look at Andy Murray's improvement in the last six months, he's realised that he had to change his behaviour if he was going to get to the top of the game, but he always had that competitiveness even if he had to deal with sometimes being a bit angry on the court. So you to have the competitiveness and not just be a good ball striker. Being a ball striker, you can win matches in juniors but if you don't have that competitiveness then you won't be able to make the transition into the pros."

So who can take that step up, who is going to be the next big thing in British tennis?

"I always hate this question," he bristles.

"You know why? Because we always find one to call the next big thing and unfortunately very few have managed to get there and it puts a lot of pressure on. It would be nice if we could get to the point where we have 10 or 20 players to talk about rather than the next best one."

He conceded, however: "There are some kids coming up, there's a group of them, but I don't want to put undue pressure on them. Okay, they've got to learn how to handle pressure, but sometimes we glorify 13-year-olds and 12-year-olds as the next Fred Perry or the next Virginia Wade and I just don't think it benefits us sometimes."

However, there is good news on the women's front. Great Britain finished runners-up to the USA after a fantastic final of the Junior Fed Cup in Mexico. Laura Robson, 14, also won the Junior title at Wimbledon this year. "She is doing fantastically well but you also have to look and respect that Martina Hingis was world No.1 at 16, Jennifer Capriati at 13 was beating Gabriela Sabatini who was then seven or eight in the world, and at 12 years old Anna Kournikova was world No.1 at under-18. It has to be put into perspective," said Rusedski.

The perspective, though, is much clearer on Murray, who has repeated Rusedski's feat of being No.4 in the world and reaching a final of the US Open. "The nice thing for Andy is that he can play on all surfaces, though the French Open is going to be the most difficult for him to win," said Rusedski.

"He can win at Wimbledon, because the courts are much slower than they used to be; he can win the US Open and he can win in Australia. The reason he got such a good run at the US Open is that he served well when it counted, though the second serve was a little bit short. If he's going to win a major with the likes of Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and those guys around, he's going to have to serve that well and make sure that his second serve is not attackable."

Rusedski believes that Murray suffered from his vulnerable second serve in the early rounds of the tournament at Flushing Meadows and it may have taken its toll. "He was pushed the distance," he said. "If he can clean up that second serve, keep on the improvement path that he's on, keep getting physically stronger and keep controlling those emotions . . . then there should be no reason why he cannot get to the very top of the game as well as win slams."

So does Rusedski miss that thrill of being on the tour? "I enjoyed the competition day in and day out," he said. "In tennis it's very black and white; there's not much of a grey area in there. When you come back to real life, it's a bit greyer."

His irrepressible character, though, has brought colour to the younger end of British tennis. Rusedski will strive to make the future brighter, too.