Monday 11th April
Tough day today as both players fell at the last hurdle in qualifying but a couple of Lucky Loser places have given them another chance.
After driving home on Friday I was making my way back up the M1 on Sunday evening to join up with Ellie Murphy and Anouska Newman. We had dinner yesterday evening in Nottingham and met up with Lewis Whiteley who is back competing after a long lay-off with injury so hopefully this is the start of a good year for Lewis.
Today started with breakfast in our rooms as we didn’t fancy paying £13.95 at the hotel (!) and then we made our way through the Monday morning rush hour traffic into Nottingham arriving at the Centre at 8.30am. One were the first ones in the gym to warm up for 25 minutes before hitting for 30 minutes on court in preparation for both matches which were first on at 10am. The girls then completed their pre-match sheets and we spoke briefly about goals they wanted to achieve as well as how they were going to compete today before they went on.
Both matches were on at the same time and it helped that the matches were next to each other but it was still tough to follow what was going on in every point played. Anouska’s match against Mariella Blackwell started well for the first two games but then she struggled with consistency and very soon found herself going from 1-0 up to 6-1, 2-0 down. She continued to fight hard but struggled to find a consistent way to construct the points and that made life for Mariella quite straightforward taking the match 6-1, 6-1. As I said last week Anouska has been working hard on changes to her game recently and it’s made competing very difficult, she’ll keep at it though and I think by the summer things will be firing again.
As one match was moving at a rapid pace Ellie’s match with Natalie Syme was the complete opposite. Ellie took the first set 6-4 after breaking and holding at 4-4 and looked in control throughout as she kept a good depth and didn’t allow Natalie to move up the court to get a strike in. The second set was a different story as Natalie upped her consistency and managed to neutralise Ellie’s best shot leading to her forcing more and then missing. Natalie took a 4-1 lead before Ellie broke and held to make it 4-3 and at this stage I thought Ellie was right back in the set but two cheap games gave Natalie the set 6-3. The third followed the same pattern as the second with Natalie playing solid and Ellie forcing more and more to try to win the point early resulting in a huge amount of unforced errors. Ellie was 5-2 down when she broke serve but couldn’t serve consistently enough to keep her in the match and after just over 2 and a half hours she lost 4-6, 6-3, 6-3.
As soon as Ellie had showered and changed we headed off site to get some lunch and on return we found out that Anouska had got a Lucky Loser and Ellie was now 2nd reserve for one so things were starting to look up for both of them. While the girls were completing their post match sheets I jumped on court for 45 minutes with Dave Hodgetts for his second session of the day before he signed in ready for tomorrow. After going through the learning points from both of the girls matches we took to the court again at 4.30pm and spent almost an hour and a half doing basket drills to targets to get their matches out of their system and also to work on the specific learning points from their matches. During the session Ellie got called to the referee’s office and was told she’s now in the main draw so it was even more reason to finish the drilling and be prepared for her match tomorrow.
We left site at 6.15pm and drove back to the hotel to shower and change and got back into Nottingham for just after 7pm (great effort from the girls to turn it around that quick!!). Unfortunately we missed meeting up with the Portuguese team but still had a great dinner and then finished the day by picking Frankie up from the train station to make the team complete!
Tomorrow I hand the team over to rookie coach Naomi Cavaday who’ll be looking after them for the rest of the week and I’ll be just focusing on Dave Hodgetts and Kiwi Claudia Williams.
Schedule for tomorrow:
(WC) Sabrina Federici (GBR) vs (4) Claudia Williams (443) (NZL) – 1st round on at 9am
(16) David Hodgetts (565) (GBR) vs (WC) Jack Findel-Hawkins (GBR) (1790) – 3rd round after 9am, N.B. 11am
