Tuesday 7th July 2015
The rain has continued on and off over the last 24 hours here in Edinburgh and unfortunately the results for Toby have been as grim as the weather!
Due to the heavy rain overnight we knew that play would be delayed this morning but when we arrived at the tennis centre at 10am we were very surprised to see that none of the first round matches were even close to going on. The rain had completely saturated the clay courts and even though the ground staff had been working on them since 7am we were told that there wouldn’t be any play on them until at least 11.30am. That meant that the indoor courts were again being used by the Tennis Europe event and our scheduled indoor practice court of 11am had been cancelled!
That left us with two options; either we didn’t hit before Toby’s doubles match or we trekked across Edinburgh to one of the parks and try and get on a court there. Well there was no way we weren’t going to practice before his match so we got back on the bus and then walked for 15-20minutes across Meadow Park before we came to 16 pretty good hard courts:
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The excellent 16 hard courts in Meadow Park
It was really good to see at least half of the courts being used including 2 courts which had a kids coaching camp on them. I know the LTA are very keen to grow tennis in the Parks and if we can get more facilities like the one in Meadow Park then I think we’ve got a chance of getting children interested in playing from a young age.
Toby and I warmed up from 11.15 – 11.45am and then hit for 45 minutes where we went through a standard warm-up plus a few specific drills to get Toby prepared for his doubles match. Being in a Park it was very windy and I was taking the brunt of it from my end but at least we managed to get some good time in on court which was probably a lot more than a lot of the players at the centre that took the option of not training before their matches. While we were training we noticed some of the foreign U14 Tennis Europe players had made their way to the park and it did dawn on me that often it’s the foreign players that seem to go the extra mile in terms of time on court, extra sessions in the gym etc. during tournaments whereas often it’s the Brits that take the easy option. Hopefully that mentality can be changed and the coaches can guide the players to train like the professionals would so that we can produce more world class players in the future.
After getting some lunch we headed back to the centre at about 1.30pm and then had to enter into the lottery of would it rain and we’d be indoors or would the rain hold off and we could get on the clay? Eventually the rain came down too heavily and it was decided that all play would go indoors for the rest of the day. That meant that we had 2 different age groups with 2 events in each age group (singles and doubles) to get completed on 6 indoor courts!
Luckily Toby’s doubles with Andrew Rozanov against top seeds Vincent Gillespie and Calum McGeoch was the first ITF doubles match on the schedule so they ended up going on at 5pm (some matches didn’t go on until closer to 9pm!).
We knew from the outset that Vincent and Calum were going to be a tough pair to play; Vincent had played in the Qualifying of Junior Wimbledon last week and they are both good doubles players but I don’t think Toby or Andrew were quite prepared for the level that their opponents brought to the match!
After Calum held serve in the opening game, Andrew had game points on his serve in the next game but unfortunately the boys lost it to a sudden death deuce point. From there Vincent and Calum raced through the first set 6-0 in 19 minutes and even though Toby held serve at the start of the second set it wasn’t enough to stop their opponents flying through the match 6-0, 6-1 – at least it helped Gill and her team out with the scheduling by being on and off court quickly!
There’s never any shame in losing to a better team and as much as no player likes to take a heavy loss it happens at all levels of tennis – even at Grand Slams. The important thing is to always learn from the matches and take away specific points to work on which I know we definitely did.
The loss in the doubles brings our week in Edinburgh to a close; we’ll head back to London tomorrow and start our preparations for Queenswood which starts on my Birthday this Sunday!
