Sunday 3rd July 2011
It was a bit more of a relaxed start to the day for some but I was up and running at 6am this morning as my Great North Run training is in full flow (details to follow on how you can sponsor me and support Make-A-Wish Foundation).
We arrived at the club just before 8am and it was straight into our warms up before stepping on the court for our pre-match hitting at 8.30am. Cameron, Mia and Anouska all had matches today so they had the priority in the warm up; whatever they wanted to do they did and everyone else in the team worked around them.
Cameron was first on at 9.30am and he was taking on Piers Herfet-Jones from The West Hants Club in Bournemouth. Cam’s nerves showed in the first couple of games but he soon got into the match and fought back from 2-0 down to get it back on serve by playing some very smart lefty clay court tennis. Up until 5-5 Cam was in control of the match and making life very difficult for Piers but his frustrations on a couple of points led the court supervisor to have a quiet word in his ear which then made him lose concentration. He went from 5-5 to 5-7, 0-4 in about 10 minutes but to his credit he fought back, held and broke to make it 2-4 but Piers played a strong last few games to take the match 7-5, 6-3. Tough result but a great performance overall and Cam will learn a lot from this experience.
Mia had gone on court just before Cam had finished so it was straight over to the other side of the club for me to court 7 to watch her. She was up against Jodie Burrage who she played in January when she was back from Bollettieri’s and the match followed almost exactly the same pattern. Mia played a very aggressive and professional first set taking it 6-1, she then raced to a 3-0 lead before Jodie fought back to make it 3-3. Mia’s unforced errors then increased at the same time as Jodie started to hit more winners but despite this Mia took a 5-3 lead and served for the match at 5-4 and 6-5 only for Jodie to take it to a tie break. Mia responded well in the breaker and took it convincingly 7-4 to win the match 6-1, 7-6 and qualify for the main draw.
We then had a short break before Anouska went on against Ella Taylor in our last match of the day. Anouska had some clear goals for the match against a player who is very tricky, especially on a clay court but all of her goals were about herself so it didn’t matter what her opponent did or how she played as this was all about Anouska. Ella won the match 6-0, 6-1 and only made 10 unforced errors throughout but Anouska achieved every goal she set for herself and played some of the best tennis I’ve seen from her in quite some time, it’s now just a case of playing at that level more often, getting used to having to hit 4/5 quality balls every point and reducing the unforced errors while she continues to attack – not easy but Anouska’s more than capable of doing that over the summer.
By the time Anouska had finished it was around 3.30pm and even though the rest of the team had been in the gym and practising on the indoor courts during the day they were very eager to get on the clay after all the matches had finished. We waited until 4.30pm and then managed to get on Centre Court for an hour to firstly work on some singles and then to finish off with some doubles.
We left site just after 6.15pm and by some miracle the girls managed to shower and change and be out by just after 7pm so we could have a reasonably early dinner!
Main draw starts tomorrow but it’s only doubles for us (depending on how many get in!)
Schedule for tomorrow:
Everyone will hopefully be in doubles action but we’ll only find out at 12pm if they have got in.
