Tuesday 7th February 2012
It was a hot day on site at the Nairobi Club today where a huge swarm of Butterflies almost caused play to be abandoned! Tom was competing for the second time in the doubles main draw and Mia had a lot of waiting around before her match was eventually postponed until tomorrow.
As in previous days are regular training session from 8 – 9.30am on court 8 was fully booked but again the players who had booked the court didn’t turn up! This meant that we had the whole court so we spent the session working on doubles specifics before Tom’s and Mia’s first round matches. At 9.30am we were all done on court and our attention turned to keeping up to date with the player’s strength and conditioning programmes. Jack and Tom wanted to change up their programme as they’d been doing the same exercises for the last 12 days so, with the help of all the equipment I travel with, they devised their own mini-circuit which I was quite impressed with:
At 11.30am Mia went off site to play a practice set with Louise-Mare Botes from South Africa while I stayed on site with Tom to prepare him for his doubles. I always think it’s important while we’re away for the players to train with as many different players as possible so, as we’re about halfway through the trip, I challenged the players to see how many they could hit with before we go home. Currently Jack and Tom have trained with 5 different players (not including each other!) and Mia has hit with 4 – their goal is to hit with more than 10.
As we were waiting for Tom’s doubles match to go on we were amazed to see that 2 girls had to wait on court for over 45 minutes before their match in very hot conditions before their court was watered. They had asked the referee if they could come off but she said that they had to wait – it was utterly unacceptable and not a way to treat the junior players.
Tom went on for his doubles around 2.30pm and had set very clear goals on what he wanted to achieve from this match – you can never guarantee winning or losing but you can make sure you improve in every match you play. Tom and Akim were up against the very strong and fiery Israeli team of Yuval Barak and Nimrod Berman. The first two games were very close and competitive but when Tom was broken at *1-1 the Israeli team stepped up a gear and raced to a 5-1 lead before taking the set 6-2. The second set was much closer but this time it was Akim that was broken at *2-2 and then Tom was broken at *2-4 to leave our boys 5-2 down. The score line didn’t affect them though and they responded by getting their first break of the match and then holding to make their opponent have to serve out the match. This time the Israelis didn’t make the same mistake and held well to take the match 6-2, 6-4.
Both Tom and I were pleased with his performance and it was very obvious that his confidence at this level is growing by the day. His movement at the net and his volleys were much better than in his previous doubles match and I think Tom and Akim’s attitude and work rate was superb throughout.
After Tom had finished Mia was due to play her first round doubles match but by this time it was 5pm and one of the girls that she was supposed to play against was still on court playing singles! This meant that the referee had to postponed the match until tomorrow as it would have been too dark to play later in the day.
All three of the players then completed their injury prevention exercises and stretched out before we went back to the hotel to shower for dinner. We decided to have dinner at our hotel tonight so that the players would have more time afterwards to do school work, call home or just relax.
Jack and I finished the day with a good game of snooker for the second time on the trip and I’m pleased to report that I’m currently 2-0 up – allez!
Schedule for tomorrow:
Anastasiya Shestakova (UKR) & Krystyna Shumlianska (UKR) vs Alessandra Gisonna (ITA) & Mia Smith (GBR) – 2nd match after 9.30am
