Norway U18 ITF Grade 5, Day 2

Tuesday 17th November 2015

Toby got the show on the road today with a solid first round win over tricky Qualifier Gustaf Navarp from Sweden to move him into the Last 16.

As we weren’t able to get in a huge amount of hitting yesterday we decided to get up early and train before our allotted practice time of 7.30am so that we could have almost an hour on court. That meant that we were up and warming up in the lobby of the hotel at 6.45am before going over to the club at 7am. When we arrived we finished off the last 15 minutes of our warm-ups and then started hitting at 7.15am. As always we played a quick game of ‘bounce’ to get us both moving and get the heart-rate up … and it definitely did that!

From 7.15am until 8am we went through an extended pre-match hit and within a few minutes we both realised that Hall 1 was quite a bit quicker than Hall 2 which we hit in yesterday – which made the decision to hit for longer this morning even more worthwhile. By 8am Toby had gone through everything and was feeling good so we went straight back to the hotel and up to the 21st floor for breakfast.

It was then back to the courts at 9.15am to keep an eye on the match before Toby’s and also make sure that we had everything ready for the match.

At 10.45am Toby went on court for his match and despite not knowing anything about his opponent we knew that he had won 3 matches in Qualifying so he obviously knew his way around these courts. Our focus recently has been on what Toby is doing on the court rather than worrying too much about specific tactics against opponents and I was pleased to see that from the start Toby was very much focussed on himself.

Toby raced to a 3-0* lead in the first set by playing some smart tennis and, whereas in the past where he might have got distracted when his opponent started to get games on the board, he maintained a good focus throughout the set to take it 6-2.

The second set followed the same scoreline as the first and at 6-2, 3-0 it seemed that Toby had the match in the bag . . . unfortunately Gustaf didn’t agree! The Swede held serve at 3-0* and then at 4-1* down he started pumping himself up which really raised the level of his game. Gustaf held serve to make it *4-2 and then for the first time in 8 service games Toby was broken following an erratic game. Once again he didn’t let the fact that Gustaf was closing the gap put him off and he broke straight back to take a *5-3 lead and serve for the match. The next two games went against Toby and even though he managed to get back on track and take the set to a tie-break he had amounted 10 unforced errors in the 4 games from 5-3 to 6-6 – compared to 11 unforced errors in the whole of the 8 game first set!

The first 7 points of the tie-break went against serve (which is very unusual for a boy’s match) but Toby held his two service points at *4-3 and went on to take the tie-break 7-3. It was a good win overall and even though Toby was disappointed with letting his opponent back into the match from 6-2, 4-1 up I looked at it from the other angle of Toby being able to re-set and flight hard when his opponent raised his level. Either way there was lots to learn from the match and we now have the chance to work on it tomorrow in the next round.

As the match schedule was packed out today with ITF and Tennis Europe matches we weren’t able to book a practice court until 8pm this evening which meant that the whole afternoon was spent at the hotel. It did give Toby a great opportunity to review the whole match though as I had filmed it from the balcony.

While we were at the hotel this afternoon the doubles draw came out:

We decided to go to PastaPasta for an early dinner at 5pm so that we had enough time to let the food digest before we needed to warm-up at 7.30pm but when we arrived at the tennis club the referee said that due to the matches running late there wouldn’t be any practice courts this evening. That was very annoying but the good news was that play doesn’t start tomorrow until 9.30am so we can go in early again and hit for an hour from7-8am to work on specifics from today’s match.

Schedule for tomorrow:

(8) Marcus Sulen (SWE) (839) vs Toby Huffer (GBR) (1585) – 1st match at 9.30am

Toby Huffer (GBR) & Neil Oberleitner (AUT) vs (2) Gilbert Jaeger (SWE) & Axel Oljons (SWE) – 4th match after 9.30am (not before 2pm)