Thursday 2nd February 2012
Mia was the last player of our team left in the draw today and was competing for a place in the doubles semi-finals.
Due to Tom not feeling well for the last couple of days he decided to make the professional decision of not training with me at 8am but to go back to bed and see if he would feel better later. That gave me some time to catch up on some work before Jack joined me for breakfast at 8.30am. We then made our way over to the tennis courts at 9.30am, warmed up and started our session on Centre Court at 10am.
The ground staff had been working on Centre for the last week so we were expecting it to be one of the best courts but within the first 2 minutes of the session we realised it was actually the worst court in the whole club! We still managed to have a great session for an hour despite both of us miss-hitting a couple of shots out of the court and onto the middle of the hockey pitch!
When we finished Mia warmed up with her doubles partner and then, after a break for some lunch, they took to the court to take on 2nd seeds Nikita Dawda from Kenya and Joanna-Nena Savva from Cyprus. Mia and Anastasija started very slowly and looked from the start as though they were struggling as a team – there was little communication and not much energy coming from either of them. They went 5-0 down before Mia held and then they managed to break before Anastasija lost her serve for the 2nd time resulting in them losing the 1st set 6-2. Not much changed in the 2nd set and Mia and Anastasija looked as though they were going to be beaten in straight sets but after a couple of holds from our girls I think their belief increased a little. They managed to hold serve to get the set level at 5-5 and then kept making their opponents play more balls which resulted in them winning the next two games to take the set 7-5.
At this stage Dawn, Jack and I expected Mia and Anastasija to come out for the match tie-break looking pumped up and ready to destroy their opponents but unfortunately the communication and energy was very much the same as in the first two sets. Their opponents however (as well as Nikita’s vocal mum) were definitely showing they were up for a fight and they raced to a 9-2 lead before finally taking the match 6-2, 5-7, 10-4. It was a match that Mia and Anastasija definitely could have won and it just goes to show that at this level if you’re the one who’s willing to fight harder, chase more balls and work physically & mentally as hard as you can you WILL get results.
After Mia’s match Jack went on court with one of the Polish boys and played a very good practice set with him. He went down 6-3 but served well and despite the very poor state of the court (the practice courts don’t get watered or re-lined at all throughout the day and by this time it was 5pm!) he was happy with the level he was finding from the back of the court.
After Mia and Jack had cooled down, stretched out, showered and changed we all had dinner together at the hotel where the normal card games were replaced by the boys taking on the girls at Charades. It wasn’t pretty and I think we all had tears in our eyes at some point during the game – Mia’s horse impression for “The Grand National” and Dawn’s demo of “The Skeleton” (Bobsleigh) were priceless. Here’s me getting pumped up as Jack managed to guess part of the answer:
Rest day tomorrow but no lie in for me!
