POPPs were beaten by 7 points overall by SUMA 1 last night after a tense and, I must say, very tiring match. We all played 6 double games each to 42 and often had to play in consecutive games. Because of the format of the games and our modest success in some of them this often meant playing over 120 point pretty well nonstop! We had a handicap of +225 but this was not quite enough to see us through. However we can take a number of positives from our performance. This was our first doubles match, none of us had played together before, our tactics were pretty well nonexistent and we were playing a Division 1 team who clearly had played doubles before! Against this background we did pretty well! Little things made the difference. We put about 12 serves off the end of the table – unforced errors perhaps but we often served long to give our partners a chance to get into position and because they could deal with our short services very comfortably. One of their players had a very tricky side spin serve that Peter and I had particular difficulty with and often failed to return it. This was worth at least 10 points per game to SUMA. When we were in a rally we had about a 35% chance of winning it – not very good but just about sufficient to win without the unforced errors and serving difficulties. Of course they made some errors too but, as you would expect, far less than we did. Our average scores per game were about 18 (winner first to 42) and we needed 1 more point in the 7 of the 9 games to win, But are we downhearted? Of course not! It was good to play against a team of their standard and get a good idea of our own standard so far. We gradually got better at returning serve, we got better at playing conservatively and playing percentage shots. We still tended to lose the cagey rallies but stayed in them longer and got to win a few more of them as we went along. If we played against this sort of opposition regularly and applied ourselves I am positive our game would improve significantly – which is the whole point of being in the League, win or lose. The match was played in very good spirit and we are looking forward to playing SUMA again – perhaps in Division 1 if we all live long enough!