Sunday 11th October 2015
After a successful tournament last week Toby suffered a first round loss in Qualifying today against an opponent who was much more used to intense heat and humidity that we had this afternoon.
We were up early this morning and at breakfast by 7.15am before getting a Tuk Tuk over to SLTA at just after 8.30am. Even though the tournament this week is at SSC we decided to warm up at SLTA because there are more courts there and also if it had rained over-night we could have hit on the hard courts. Luckily there wasn’t any rain and at 9.15am we managed to get on one of the bottom practice courts to go through Toby’s pre-match hit. Even at that time in the morning the temperature was pushing 30°C so it was important to make sure that we did exactly what we needed to do to prepare for the match without wasting any energy.
After the practice session we headed over to SSC and found the courts still a little wet from the rain yesterday evening but play finally got underway on Toby’s court at around 10.30am. Toby’s match followed fellow Brit Jonea Bach’s match and as she was 4-1 up in the first set when play resumed we knew it wasn’t going to be long before he was on.
At 11.30am Toby went on court to take on Gaurang Gaurang from India and even though we didn’t know anything about his opponent we knew that there aren’t any easy matches out here so it was important that Toby got a good start.
The first game didn’t go to plan as Toby was broken but then he raised his level and won the next 3 games in a row with some good tennis from the back of the court. At this stage Toby was in full control of the match but a series of cheap points in the next two games not only allowed his opponent to get back into the match but also gave him a bit of confidence. Toby held serve to take a 4-3* lead and then played a very solid game to break Gaurang and at this stage it was looking like Toby would go on to hold serve and take the set. Unfortunately he was broken at *5-3 but remained positive and broke straight back to win the set 6-4 in a couple of minutes short of an hour.
The length of the first set combined with the increase in confidence in his opponents game led to Toby struggling at the start of the second set. He was broken in the first game and even though he played a very good game at *0-2 to hold serve, he found it difficult to maintain his level and the set quickly went against him 6-1.
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Toby serving during his 1st round match today at SSC
Toby took a toilet break at the end of the set to try to give himself a little more time to recover but by this stage the intense heat and humidity had taken a lot out of him and when the third set started he soon found himself 0-3 down. To his credit he continued to fight as hard as he could and tried hard to pump himself up throughout the set but his opponent played a very well to take the match 4-6, 6-1, 6-1 in 2 hours and 40 minutes.
As disappointing as it was to lose the match today we have to remember that last week Toby made his first ever ITF singles 1/4 final and doubles semi-final and in doing so probably took a lot out of him. We have either trained or competed for the last 10 days in a row and on some of those days Toby had both a singles and a doubles match whereas his opponent today was coming in completely fresh having not competed last week.
Once the match had finished it was important to get Toby into some air-conditioning to try and cool him down so, as there wasn’t an air-conditioned room anywhere at SSC, we headed back over to SLTA. We then had some lunch there before heading back to the hotel.
Before dinner this evening we headed over to Majestic City to get a few DVDs but weren’t happy that the main two that we went for (Everest and Straight Outta Compton) haven’t been imported yet!
From there we got a Tuk Tuk to The Dutch Hospital where we had dinner at TGI Fridays. It was then back to the hotel to relax for the evening while watching “Get Hard” with Will Farrell which, after a tough day, managed to get a couple of laughs out of both of us!
Tomorrow we’ll go over to SSC to sign-in for the doubles with Ondrej and hope for a bit of luck in getting in as today’s loss will put the boys a little lower down the priority order.
