Julian Alonso, ranked 63rd and better known as Martina Hingis's boyfriend, scored Spain's only win in Stockholm.

He defeated Thomas Johansson 6-1, 7-6 (7-3) in the first of the `dead' rubbers after being sent into battle in place of Alex Corretja by Spanish coach Manuel Santana.

Sweden's 26-year-old number-one Jonas Bjorkman then outplayed jaded French Open champion Carlos Moya 6-3, 7-5 and declared: ``I'd love the chance to win the Davis Cup for the third time. I'm looking forward to it.''The home captain Carl-Axel Hageskog said that teamwork had been the basis of the Swedish success.

``I'm very pleased and proud,'' he said. ``The players did a fantastic job to win four of five tough matches.''

Sweden, who will be playing in the final for a twelfth time, werechampions in 1975, 1984, 1985, 1987, 1994 and 1997.

The United States had to field an understrength team against Italy in Milwaukee when their top players Pete Sampras, Andre Agassi and Michael Chang all made themselves `unavailable' for the match. And they paid the price.

It was left to Jan-Michael Gambill to salvage the only American success on the final day. He beat Davide Sanguinetti 4-6, 6-3, 6-3 in the final of the rubbers although the Italian clearly had trouble getting motivated after his first-day victory over Todd Martin.

Gianluca Pozzi earlier made it 4-0 for the Italians when he defeated Justin Gimelstob 7-6 (7-4), 7-5. Italy, whose only victory in the competition came in 1976 have been runners-up five times. They lost to Sweden in the semi-finals last year.

In the qualifying matches, Britain returned to the top-flight when they completed a 3-2 victory over India at Nottingham.

Britain have been out of the 16-nation World Group since 1992 and their last success in the event came in1936.

United States Open champion Patrick Rafter and Jason Stoltenberg breezed through the reverse singles to hand Australia a 5-0 clean sweep over Uzbekistan in Townsville.

With the tie already safely won on Saturday, Rafter cruised past Dmitri Tomashevich 6-2, 6-4 and Stoltenberg disposed of Oleg Ogorodov 6-3, 6-3.Todd Woodbridge and Mark Woodforde had wrapped up Australia's victory 24 hours earlier with a 6-3, 7-6 (7-3), 7-6 (7-4) win over Uzbek pair Ogorodov and Tomashevich.

In other qualifying matches, Russia finally beat Japan 3-1 in Osaka -- the final `dead' rubber singles being abandoned because of rain, while in Prague, the Czech Republic were 5-0 winners over South Africa.

Netherlands also won all their matches against Ecuador in Eindhoven and France ended up with a 4-1 win over Israel in their last match with Yannick Noah as captain Cedric Pioline being beaten in the first of the reverse singles by Harel Levi before Nicolas Escude saw off Amir Hadad.