Guillermo Vilas, the legendary former world No 2 and grand-slam champion from Argentina, predicted last week that Great Britain would endure a rough time in next week’s Davis Cup World Group tie in Buenos Aires. He can change that to humiliating.

With Andy Murray in the team, Britain’s prospects of victory in the cauldron of the Estádio Parque Roca were somewhere between remote and nil. Last night’s news that the British No 1 had withdrawn because his right knee had started to play up eight days before the match gets under way means that Alex Bogdanovic, Jamie Baker, Jamie Murray and Ross Hutchins will have to perform with mind-blowing courage and fortitude to prevent a 3-0, nine-set whitewash.

Bogdanovic has lost in the first round in the two Challenger tournaments he has played since failing to qualify for the Australian Open; Baker was beaten in qualifying for the Vina Del Mar ATP tournament in Chile on Tuesday and won four games against Horacio Zeballos, the Argentine No 24. Wait until he plays David Nal-bandian, their No 1, in a rubber on the opening day a week tomorrow.

The Britain team – without Andy Murray – visited a Chilean vineyard on Tuesday to taste the local grape. Once they learnt of his absence, they probably slipped back for a few more gulps to deaden the pain.

Murray had said last year that he would be building his schedule around what he believed were his priorities and that wandering the globe playing in the Davis Cup might not be in his best ranking interest. The return of the bipartite patella injury in his right knee that has dogged him since his junior days is ill-timed in the national interest, but, he hopes, will not set back his tour schedule.

“Following the intensive off-season training, my right knee started to act up when I returned from Australia,” Murray said last night. “We had a scan done and following discussions with my team we decided that it is better not to play in the Davis Cup.

“I am very disappointed not to be joining my teammates because I love playing for my country and have always enjoyed the team atmosphere. Since returning from Australia my knee is still bothering me and the experts have advised that going from hard courts to playing five-set matches on clay and then back to indoor hard courts could increase the chances of further injury and I don’t want to take that risk.”

Jez Green, Murray’s fitness trainer, said that the player’s workload in December was “incredibly high” and put a lot of stress on the right knee. “Changing surfaces three times in such a short time-span would be a great risk to further injury,” Green said. But it has long been acknowledged that clay is a far less punishing surface on joints than hard courts, so would not sustaining an outside chance of keeping Britain in the World Group be preferable to playing a small ATP tour event in Marseilles?

John Lloyd, the Britain captain, is shell-shocked, not least because he heard the news from the LTA rather than the player. “What can we do?” he said, knowing that the country can prepare for a relegation play-off in September. “I feel bad for Andy because whatever happens in the match it is going to be an unbelievable experience that may never happen again. It is the kind of occasion you will always remember. I really believed he was capable of winning two matches.”

The news follows hard on the heels of the departure from the LTA of Bill Mountford, who was imported from the United States to oversee the junior development and coaching structure pinpointed by Stuart Smith, the LTA president, as “our No 1 priority” in his annual address last month.

Mountford’s shock move is the highest-profile departure from the Tennis Leadership Team established after Roger Draper’s return to the LTA as chief executive from Sport England two years ago. In his brief tenure, during which he had hardly begun to scratch away at the surface of his enormous task, Mountford had earned huge respect for his diligence, knowledge and approachability.

Where his decision to depart – for undisclosed reasons, although he was said to be increasingly at odds with what he perceived as a lack of direction – leaves the governing body is anyone’s guess. The development of a structure in which coaches feel supported, young players are able to thrive and competition abounds is the essential core of the sport’s prospect of building a successful future. That is where Mountford came in and where, without warning, he has gone out.