Sri Lanka U18 ITF Grade 5 (week 2), Day 2

Saturday 11^th October 2014

It was another very difficult start to Qualifying again this week as both Toby and Nils came up against stronger opponents in their opening rounds.

Due to the sheer volume of rain we’ve had over the last few days here in Colombo the referee had decided to make the start times this morning much later than he normally would have so that the clay courts had time to dry out. That meant that the boys had a lie-in and we met for breakfast at 8.30am. We then headed over to the club at 9.30am with the plan being to hit from 10.30-11am and then have some lunch before Nils was first on at 12.30pm. However, when we arrived we were told that there were no practice courts available as the club coaching programme was using all of the bottom clay courts and the hard courts were being used for matches!

I eventually managed to convince one of the coaches to let us use his court for 30 minutes until his next lesson turned up and, after warming up thoroughly, Toby and Nils had a good practice on the clay for the first time in 3 days! We got almost everything warmed up on the clay apart from serves and returns and after the lesson had turned up we moved to one of the hard courts to finish our practice.

At 12.15pm (a little earlier than scheduled) Nils went on court to face Devanand Mohan from India and following a very good week of practice Nils was going into the match full of confidence. Unfortunately after a couple of long games at the start of the match Nils found himself 0-2* down and with that his frustration started to build while his opponent grew in confidence. Nils was playing some points at a high level but just couldn’t find the consistency to do it enough to get games on and board. Despite getting frustrated with how he was playing Nils kept battling away and even at 6-0, 4-0 down he continued to fight has hard as he could to get his first game. He was rewarded by breaking his opponent at that stage of the match and after taking at *40-0 lead in the next game I thought he was going to start a comeback but it wasn’t to be and he eventually went down 6-0, 6-1. Nils was not so much disappointed with losing that match as much as he was with not being about to produce the level of tennis that he had in training over the last 6 days – but that’s tennis and if it was easy to reproduce our training level in matches then we’d all be much better players!

Toby started to warm up for his match just as Nils was finishing so after I had a quick debrief with Nils I went straight to Toby’s court to watch him play Rishi Reddy from India.

Toby started well and raced to a 2-0 lead by playing some solid tennis but then Rishi really raised his level and hit 10 winners in the next four games to completely turn the set around. Toby managed to hold on to his next service game to keep the score close but Rishi held and broke Toby for the 3^rd time and went on to take the set 6-4.

After the 1^st set Toby took a toilet break and when he returned he seemed to have a clearer plan of what he needed to do to stop Rishi from dominating the points. He stepped up from the very first game of the set and starting controlling his opponent a lot more from the back of the court which in turn prevented Rishi from hitting winners. Toby played his best game of the match at 3-2* and although he didn’t win the game he created lots of opportunities for himself and made Rishi hit 3 winners to win the game. That game took quite a lot out of Toby and when Rishi hit a dead net cord on the first point of the next game and then Toby double faulted it seemed as though the momentum shifted in Rishi’s favour. Toby was broken at *3-3 and even though he was *40-15 up at *3-5 he couldn’t convert that game and eventually went down 6-4, 6-3.

Overall it was a good match but what was really interesting was that both Toby and I agreed that the 2^nd set was much better than the 1^st set, however, the stats don’t see it that way! – 1^st set Toby hit 8 winners and 15 unforced errors which equals an aggressive balance of -7 whereas the 2^nd set was 4 winners and 19 unforced errors which equals an aggressive balance of -15. So, why was the 2^nd set better? Because Toby controlled more points, increased his intensity during the rallies and created more opportunities. Unfortunately he couldn’t convert those opportunities but his game will develop more playing that way and next time hopefully he will take more of those chances.

After the match Toby and I had good debrief by the side of the court and we both agreed that as much as it was disappointing to lose, there were a lot of positives to come out of it, especially in the 2^nd set.

We returned to the hotel at around 5pm and had a couple of hours to relax before we went out at 7pm to meet Nils’ family and friend for dinner at the Gallery Café. It was a bit of a hard task to find the restaurant but the long journey was definitely worth it as the food was amazing! We all had the fillet steak which was recommended by Nils’ dad and then the boys had a ‘chocolate nemesis’ for dessert which was as good as it sounds!

Our attention now turns to trying to get into the doubles on Monday and getting back into training starting first thing in the morning.