Wednesday 13th April 2011
The day started a little differently today as we were woken at 4am by the Fire Alarm going off in the Travelodge and then spent the next 45 minutes waiting on the pavement outside the hotel as the Fire Brigade arrived and eventually announced it as a False Alarm!!
Not the best start to the day at 4am!
We got up for the second time at 8am, had breakfast in the room and made our way to the tennis centre at 9am. Claudia was the first to practise so we warmed up in the gym for half an hour and then got on court to play some practise points out with Farah Abdel-Aziz who was with me in Kenya. Claudia worked hard and addressed a lot of the points that we raised from her match yesterday. She’s experienced a problem that a lot of players find when they’re on the road for a long period of time and that’s when they get towards the end of the trip players tend to lose a little focus and intensity and really need to spend some time working on their game before competing again. I know of a few players who play 30+ ITFs per year and it really doesn’t help with their game development if it’s only to chase points and not to improve as a player.
As Claudia was finishing her session Dave arrived and started his warm up so I went straight over onto the next court to get him ready for his doubles match. He warmed up thoroughly and then spent some time developing his game, working mainly on his serve and returns before playing some points out. We all then had lunch and discussed the plan for the afternoon – Dave was just waiting for his court to become available for his doubles match while Claudia went into the gym to go through her strength and conditioning programme. It’s been a little surprising this week how few players have actually been in the gym whether it was for a cardio warm up, to do any injury prevention exercises or to follow their strength and conditioning programme. That’s always the major difference between the junior and senior tour, how much work outside of their on court training the players complete on a day to day basis. If the juniors did get used to it at an early age it would be a much easier transition into the senior game and the demands that are placed on the body.
Dave and Oliver Plaskett went on court at around 2.30pm and they were taking on 6th seeds Toby Mitchell and Toby Martin from Bath. From the start it was obvious that one team had played / trained together before and one had not. The Bath boys were much sharper at the net and took their chances when they came up. They broke early in the first set and then again at 5-2 to take the set 6-2 and the pattern continued in the second as Dave and Oliver found themselves 6-2, 5-2 down. They then fought hard, served and returned better to hold, break and hold again to level the set at 5-5. Unfortunately at 5-6 they were broken again and went down 6-2, 7-5, not bad for a team who were playing together for the first time but both boys knew they had not performed well.
Again it was good to go through the match immediately with Dave and write some notes that we can look back at next week when we travel to Bosnia for the ITF Grade 4 event.
I’m staying over tonight to watch some of the matches tomorrow and then it’ll be back home for the weekend and back on the road again on Monday.
