Sunday 12^th October 2014

It was a good day of training today ahead of finding out if the boys have got into the doubles draw tomorrow.

We were up and at breakfast this morning at 8am as the plan for the day was to do two good sessions on court and a gym session too. However, when we arrived at the club at 9.15am we were surprised to see that there had been a huge downpour of rain directly over the club but there was no sign of it on the way to the club which is less than 1.5km! The referee told us that the courts would be out for the next 2-3 hours so we got straight back into a Tuk Tuk and went back to the hotel.

When we got back we hit the gym for a good hour and a half session where Toby went through a strength session followed by some intervals while Nils did some core work and finished with some intervals of his own.

We then had some lunch in the room and went over the details from the matches yesterday to prepare the boys for their on-court session in the afternoon.

Luckily for us the sun had been out since the big downpour this morning and when we arrived back at the club at 1.30pm the courts had dried out completely. The boys went through their physical warm-up on court and then hit for around 20 minutes before going straight into playing two sets.

Nils played very well in the opening set, it was probably the best I had seen him play on the whole trip and the issues that he had been having with his consistency were non-existent! Nils took a lead early on in the set and then maintained his focus until 4-0 when he threw in a random game of four unforced errors. He did well to get back on track in the next two games and won both of them to take the set 6-1. Toby’s level during the set had been a little erratic but the result of the set was mainly down to the level that Nils was playing at rather than mistakes that Toby was making.

At the end of the set I brought both boys together to go through some of the notes and stats that I had taken and then we re-set some goals before the boys went into their second set.

Toby found a much better level at the start of the second set and was able to dictate more of the points which resulted in him taking a 2-0 lead. Nils responded well and raised his level to break Toby and then hold himself to level the set at 2-2 but Toby fought back to hold serve in the next game which kept the set on serve. Despite some tight service games (especially Toby’s service game at 4-4 which lasted 10 points) the rest of the set went with serve until 5-4 when Toby managed to tough out another long game and take the set 6-4. By this stage the boys had been playing for over 2 hours and were both quite exhausted but they managed to sum up enough energy to finish the session with a match tie-break which Nils eventually won 10-8.

It was a good session where both boys worked hard on developing their games and also dealing with some difficult situations during the sets. Once we were finished we played a few games of ‘bounce’ as a cool down and then the boys consulted the referee about the possibilities of getting into the doubles tomorrow before we headed back to the hotel.

Nils joined his family for dinner this evening while Toby and I decided to have a change of scenery and go to the tennis club to eat at the Italian restaurant. We didn’t realise that it was movie night there though and they had a big screen set up right outside the restaurant:

After dinner we headed back to the hotel to relax and ended up watching the end of Die Hard 3 followed by almost the whole of Die Hard 4!!

Saturday 11^th October 2014

It was another very difficult start to Qualifying again this week as both Toby and Nils came up against stronger opponents in their opening rounds.

Due to the sheer volume of rain we’ve had over the last few days here in Colombo the referee had decided to make the start times this morning much later than he normally would have so that the clay courts had time to dry out. That meant that the boys had a lie-in and we met for breakfast at 8.30am. We then headed over to the club at 9.30am with the plan being to hit from 10.30-11am and then have some lunch before Nils was first on at 12.30pm. However, when we arrived we were told that there were no practice courts available as the club coaching programme was using all of the bottom clay courts and the hard courts were being used for matches!

I eventually managed to convince one of the coaches to let us use his court for 30 minutes until his next lesson turned up and, after warming up thoroughly, Toby and Nils had a good practice on the clay for the first time in 3 days! We got almost everything warmed up on the clay apart from serves and returns and after the lesson had turned up we moved to one of the hard courts to finish our practice.

At 12.15pm (a little earlier than scheduled) Nils went on court to face Devanand Mohan from India and following a very good week of practice Nils was going into the match full of confidence. Unfortunately after a couple of long games at the start of the match Nils found himself 0-2* down and with that his frustration started to build while his opponent grew in confidence. Nils was playing some points at a high level but just couldn’t find the consistency to do it enough to get games on and board. Despite getting frustrated with how he was playing Nils kept battling away and even at 6-0, 4-0 down he continued to fight has hard as he could to get his first game. He was rewarded by breaking his opponent at that stage of the match and after taking at *40-0 lead in the next game I thought he was going to start a comeback but it wasn’t to be and he eventually went down 6-0, 6-1. Nils was not so much disappointed with losing that match as much as he was with not being about to produce the level of tennis that he had in training over the last 6 days – but that’s tennis and if it was easy to reproduce our training level in matches then we’d all be much better players!

Toby started to warm up for his match just as Nils was finishing so after I had a quick debrief with Nils I went straight to Toby’s court to watch him play Rishi Reddy from India.

Toby started well and raced to a 2-0 lead by playing some solid tennis but then Rishi really raised his level and hit 10 winners in the next four games to completely turn the set around. Toby managed to hold on to his next service game to keep the score close but Rishi held and broke Toby for the 3^rd time and went on to take the set 6-4.

After the 1^st set Toby took a toilet break and when he returned he seemed to have a clearer plan of what he needed to do to stop Rishi from dominating the points. He stepped up from the very first game of the set and starting controlling his opponent a lot more from the back of the court which in turn prevented Rishi from hitting winners. Toby played his best game of the match at 3-2* and although he didn’t win the game he created lots of opportunities for himself and made Rishi hit 3 winners to win the game. That game took quite a lot out of Toby and when Rishi hit a dead net cord on the first point of the next game and then Toby double faulted it seemed as though the momentum shifted in Rishi’s favour. Toby was broken at *3-3 and even though he was *40-15 up at *3-5 he couldn’t convert that game and eventually went down 6-4, 6-3.

Overall it was a good match but what was really interesting was that both Toby and I agreed that the 2^nd set was much better than the 1^st set, however, the stats don’t see it that way! – 1^st set Toby hit 8 winners and 15 unforced errors which equals an aggressive balance of -7 whereas the 2^nd set was 4 winners and 19 unforced errors which equals an aggressive balance of -15. So, why was the 2^nd set better? Because Toby controlled more points, increased his intensity during the rallies and created more opportunities. Unfortunately he couldn’t convert those opportunities but his game will develop more playing that way and next time hopefully he will take more of those chances.

After the match Toby and I had good debrief by the side of the court and we both agreed that as much as it was disappointing to lose, there were a lot of positives to come out of it, especially in the 2^nd set.

We returned to the hotel at around 5pm and had a couple of hours to relax before we went out at 7pm to meet Nils’ family and friend for dinner at the Gallery Café. It was a bit of a hard task to find the restaurant but the long journey was definitely worth it as the food was amazing! We all had the fillet steak which was recommended by Nils’ dad and then the boys had a ‘chocolate nemesis’ for dessert which was as good as it sounds!

Our attention now turns to trying to get into the doubles on Monday and getting back into training starting first thing in the morning.

Friday 10^th October 2014

As week 2 starts here in Colombo it was another very wet day but we made the most of it and ended up getting in a good session on court this afternoon.

The plan for today was always to have a lighter morning and let the players have a lie-in as they’d been getting up between 6-7am for the last week, and then have a longer training session this afternoon. As the morning went on it seemed as though everything was going to plan; the boys didn’t set an alarm and just let themselves wake up naturally and then after breakfast they both got stuck into some school work.

We then all had lunch in the apartment at 12pm and had planned on going over to the club at 1pm but almost as soon as we finished eating a huge thunderstorm came over Colombo:

We knew the courts would be flooded so we decided to stay at the hotel for a while and eventually went over to the club at 3pm. Even at that time the match courts were still very wet so we went down to the bottom two hard courts and, while the boys went through their warm-up routines, I swept the puddles off the court!

Once we had completed some good sprints Toby and Nils began hitting and despite the court still being quite wet we had a good session for an hour and a half. We did a lot of work on depth and consistency of shots and then moved on to warming up their volleys before the boys decided to finish with some points.

By the end of the session both boys felt good and ready for their match tomorrow.

Once Toby and Nils had signed in we went back to the hotel to change and then headed out to dinner at the other Hilton again. During the meal the draw was posted and to our surprise there were only 15 players in Qualifying!

After dinner we headed back to the hotel and started watching the next DVD in the pile which was “A million ways to die in the West”. We’re currently about half way through and it’s actually not bad!

Schedule for tomorrow:

Nils Larsson Regnstrom (SWE) (UNR) vs Devanand Mohan (IND) (UNR) – 1^st match at 12.30pm

Rishi Reddy (IND) vs Toby Huffer (GBR) (UNR) – 2^nd match after 12pm