Monday 6th July 2015
It wasn’t the result we’d been hoping for today as Toby lost in the first round of the singles to one of the new kids on the block; Jack Draper.
As Toby wasn’t scheduled until 5th round of matches on today he decided to have a bit of a lie in while I got up early to continue with my training for the Great North Run in September. I had a really nice run along Union Canal before joining the main road up to the tennis centre and then when I got there my plan was to book practice for this morning. We’d not been allowed to book any practice yesterday because the weather forecast wasn’t good and they wanted to keep the indoor courts reserved for the first couple of rounds of matches – and when I asked again at 8am I got the same response!!
With that I headed back to the B&B to meet up with Toby, have breakfast and then we got a bus at just after 10am back to the tennis centre. When we arrived Toby went straight to the practice desk to see what could be done and after a little persuading we managed to get the first indoor court available after the U14 Tennis Europe first round of matches had finished. That gave us around 25 minutes to warm up before we got on court to hit from 11-11.30am. Toby was hitting really well on the indoor courts and once we’d gone through some specific tactical work he felt ready for his first round match.
Due to the weather everything had been delayed and Toby and Jack didn’t end up going on court until 4.45pm. When they started it was Jack that settled into the match the quicker of the two and broke Toby’s serve in the opening game. Toby responded well to break straight back and then followed-up with a hold to take a 2-1* lead. At this stage I felt as though Toby had found his range and I fully expected him to use his physical advantage to push on and extend his lead but Jack fought hard in his next service game to level the set at *2-2. From that stage Jack raised his level hitting 4 winners and only 2 unforced errors in the next 4 games while Toby became more erratic and posted stats of 1 winner and 11 unforced errors which resulted in Jack taking the set 6-2.
The start of the second set was extremely tight and even though Toby found a high level of hitting at times, they were mainly in Jack’s service games which didn’t help him hold his own serve! The boys exchanged 3 service breaks each until 3-3* when Jack held and then went on to win the next two games in a row to take the match 6-2, 6-3.
It was a disappointing performance from Toby and even though Jack produced some good tennis during the match, Toby produced too many errors and only held serve once out of 9 service games which is not good enough to compete at this level.
The match finished at 6.15pm and after Toby had cooled down, showered and changed we got the bus back to the hotel. It was then out to Zizzi’s for dinner and then back to the B&B to go through the details of the match and prepare for the doubles tomorrow.
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Boy’s Doubles Draw
Schedule for tomorrow:
(1) Vincent Gillespie (GBR) & Calum McGoech (GBR) vs Toby Huffer (GBR) & Andrew Rozanov (GBR) – 4th match after 9am (not before 2.30pm)
