Botswana U18 ITF Grade 5, Day 4

Sunday 26^th April 2015

Toby had a very tough match today but despite not playing his best, he managed to fight through it and into the Main Draw.

Our day started a little early than the last couple of days and we were up and at breakfast by 7am. Benny then drove us to the club at 8am so that we had plenty of time to warm up before our 9am pre-match hit. During the session I was really pleased with how well Toby was timing the ball and I think in the first 10 minutes he only missed 2 or 3 balls! We needed to move courts during the 30 minute hit but that did us a bit of a favour as it meant that Toby could hit on his match court and it also gave him a chance to get used to the position of the sun.

From 9.30 – 10am we relaxed and then went through a pre-match briefing so that we were both on the same page with tactics and goals for the match. Then at 10am Toby went on to face Da-niel Kotze from South Africa.

Toby started with a solid first game and held serve to take a 1-0 lead but Da-niel responded with a good hold of his own to level the set. Then at 1-1 with Toby serving things started to do downhill pretty quickly. His serving percentage was a little lower than normal but the big difficulty that Toby had was maintaining a consistency from the back of the court. Da-niel wasn’t really doing much with the ball and in fact he only hit 2 winners in the next 4 games but at the same time Toby made 13 unforced errors and found himself *1-5 down. Over the past couple of months Toby has been working hard on analysing problems on the court and fighting hard to turn things around when they’re not going his way. I’m very pleased that he did just that today! From *1-5 he went back to basics; he made a lot more first serves and made sure that Da-niel had to work harder to win points. After holding serve he broke immediately and with that boost of confidence he suddenly found more of the game that he had been executing in practice over the last few days. Toby went on to win 6 games in a row from *1-5 down and despite some tight moments when Da-niel made a couple of bad calls, Toby kept his nerve and took the set on his 5^th set point after 1 hour 10 minutes.

Once that set was under his belt Toby relaxed a little more while at the same time Da-niel’s game started to deteriorate and his unforced error count started to climb considerably. Toby went on to take the set 6-0 in just over 20 minutes and I would say that the second set was as much to do with Toby breaking Dan-niel’s spirits after the first set as it was to do with the actual tennis played!

After the match Toby was disappointed with the level he had produced but we agreed that the most important thing was that he had fought very hard through some very tough times and now he’s still alive to fight another day. He’s also through to the Main Draw of an ITF for the first time since he competed in Namibia last May so there are always positives to take from any match. Toby also said he wanted to get back on court later in the day to improve his level which is great to hear from a player, especially after a tough match and when the easy option would be just to rest and say “I’ll work on my game tomorrow”.

For lunch Benny took us over to the ‘Airport Junction’ Mall where we had a couple of superb pasta dishes at Rhapsody’s before returning to the guesthouse to chill out for a couple of hours.

Benny then picked us up at 4pm to take us back to the club where we had a good 30 minutes of working on specifics from the match this morning before having around 25 minutes of points with Luis Pita from Portugal.

We then headed over to Rodizio’s for dinner and to watch the second half of the Chelsea vs Arsenal game before going back to the club to check out the Main Draw:

It was then finally back to the guesthouse to wind down and get everything ready for Toby’s 1^st round tomorrow.

Schedule for tomorrow:

Mpho Mbizo (BOT) (UNR) vs (Q) Toby Huffer (GBR) (UNR) – 1^st match at 9am