What else could Lloyd do?

British tennis sunk to a new low on Sunday when Great Britain fell to an humiliating Davis Cup defeat by Lithuania - a country no-one here knew had any professional tennis players before last Friday and one whose budget is minute compared to that of the Lawn Tennis Association. But yet again, we were shown that beyond Andy Murray, who with good reason decided there were more important matches to prepare for and gave the tie a miss, the standard of men's tennis in this country is laughable - and make no mistake, other countries are pointing and giggling at us for this.

Nonetheless, our collection of never-have-beens and never-will-bes were expected to see off Lithuania's spirited teenagers. Day one gave us few surprises as James Ward easily saw off Laurynas Grigelis, ranked 523 in the world. Then Dan Evans, a young man who as yet has shown not enough application nor discipline to suggest he has what it takes, went down in five sets. In fairness the man he was facing, Ricardas Berankis, has shown promise in the last 12 months and has risen up the rankings.

Day two brought an expected win in the doubles for Colin Fleming and Ken Skupski - Britain's only success story in men's tennis in the last year apart from Murray. But yesterday it all came crashing down as first Ward then Evans bottled it when it mattered. Now they face a play off against Turkey in July to avoid relegation to the Euro/African Zone Group III - the lowest tier of the competition.

Broken man: GB captain John Lloyd

Team captain John Lloyd is understandably considering his future - after all he has just become the first GB captain to lose five straight ties. But whilst his tenure has been a disaster, this humiliation has been coming and he should not shoulder all of the blame. The LTA have in recent years developed an excellent facility at Roehampton, but they seem to have forgotten to produce any players worthy of note.

Having Murray in the team creates a false impression of where British tennis is at. Murray is undoubtedly one of the best players in the world but he is not an LTA product. His mother Judy saw how inept they were and took her son to train in Spain in an effort to make the most of his obvious talents. This is opposed to, say, Alex Bogdanovic who has had money thrown at him by the LTA only for him to get knocked out at the first round of Wimbledon eight years running.

Lloyd can only work with what's being produced and right now what is coming through just isn't good enough. Ward is one of those players we only see on the opening days of Wimbledon and Evans is a volatile 19-year-old who looks odd-on into becoming merely the same. It's time for heads to roll and I mean those above Lloyd's.