Growth of balls in the universal cover of surfaces and graphs

In this paper, we prove uniform lower bounds on the volume growth of balls in the universal covers of Riemannian surfaces and graphs. More precisely, there exists a constant $\delta>0$ such that if $(M,hyp)$ is a closed hyperbolic surface and $h$ another metric on $M$ with $\area(M,h)\leq \delta \area(M,hyp)$ then for every radius $R\geq 1$ the universal cover of $(M,h)$ contains an $R$-ball with area at least the area of an $R$-ball in the hyperbolic plane. This positively answers a question of L. Guth for surfaces. We also prove an analog theorem for graphs.