by Last Saturday I played interclub tennis for the first time since I moved to Wellington. I was a bit apprehensive as you might expect. The first thing I found out was that they’d changed the rules this season. Doubles matches would now feature a sudden-death point on the second deuce, and the third set would be replaced by a super tie-break up to ten points. I like to look back at matches I’ve played over the years; some I remember very well, a lot I’ve forgotten. The ones that live long in my memory nearly all involve 22-point games and/or three sets. Never playing any more than nine points in a game, or two real sets, turns everything into a whole pile of meh. (Do people still say “meh”? I have no idea.) The professionals have used a similar system for a while now, so change was probably unavoidable, but it was likely brought about by people in the first paragraph for whom playing four hours of tennis, let alone hanging around in the glorious sunshine (like we had on Saturday) in between matches, is completely incompatible with taking Sophie, Tom and George here, there and everywhere to achieve this, that and the other. I was very relieved to find out that singles was still three proper sets, with proper deuces, but give it a few years… Indeed, my singles opponent suggested before our match that we play a super tie-break instead of a third set, and I suggested to him “no bloody way” as politely as I could.
Anyway, on to the actual tennis. It was a fantastic morning for it. We played doubles first, and as isn’t always the case, I’d played with my partner a few times before so we knew each other’s games. This was a big help. Our opponents weren’t so good that involving them at the net meant instant death, and I felt able to play my natural game which usually means a lot of running around and scrambling. It was a scrappy match but that’s how I prefer doubles. My partner was up-and-down, as he usually is, but he became more consistent in the second set. We won 6-4 6-2. The sudden death situation cropped up five times: we won just two of those, but one of them came on my partner’s serve in the penultimate game. We saved five break points in that game – the most you possibly can under this format – and that was huge in the context of the match.
I thought I would win the singles. (Confidence! Amazing, isn’t it?) When I played in Auckland, winning the doubles but losing the singles was a rare occurrence. Sure enough, after ten minutes I led 4-0 having lost exactly one point in each game. But I’ve been there before. Opponents relax, they get used to my game, they simply get better. And he certainly did, most noticeably on serve. In contrast I started to get bogged down and didn’t want to take any risks (I was fully aware of this and tried to become more aggressive). The rallies got longer. We took longer breaks at the changeovers. Still, I led 6-1 3-1. That became 3-3. The crucial seventh game (to go all Dan Maskell) was a long, bruising affair which I won, but he then held for 4-4. I then won my own serve and was able to do enough with his strong first serve in the next game to get into the rallies. We had plenty of them. I dug my heels in on the match point, as if I was down match point, and eventually won another long rally. It felt good to come through that match against a tricky opponent whose game was similar to mine, and hopefully next time I’ll feel more relaxed and able to play my shots.
As a team (I played in the bottom position) we lost out by eight games after tying 3-3 in matches and 7-7 in sets. We still got a point for every match we won.
