The last match before the Christmas break was lost 3 – 6 to the Tradesmen and we came away reasonabley happy in the circumstances. I was not due to play and was suffering from a cold (although I’m pretty certain this didn’t make any difference to the outcome of my sets) and Derek was supposed to be resting his shoulder that had begun to cause him some pain and mobility problems. However, even with a pool of 6 players we were struggling to put a team together on this occassion. Tradesmen 2 are a good team and two of their players finished in the top 10 last year, Roger and Harry. All the sets against these two went to 4 games apart from John going to 5 before losing. This was probably our best chance of getting another set. So our 3 sets were all against their no. 3, a young lad (Mark?) who had some very good attacking shots but they were deployed rather optimistically at times leading to a lot of errors. In fact just like I play! He clearly has lots of potential and will go on to be a very good player. Despite his game being somewhat erratic he took me to 5 games but for a change I managed to win the 5th. I have gone to 5 games on a number of occassions this year but never managed to win one up to now.  Roger and Harry played a patient defensive game mainly chopping everything back and waiting for impatience to overcome us when we would go for a winning shot, often ending up with an unforced error. In my case they didn’t have to wait too long. We watched a Japanese film sometime ago, called Ping Pong, in which the main theme was table tennis. A top Chinese player, observing an opponent who chopped everything back, made the observation that ‘choppers never win”. Complete rubbish, obviously!  I think it is fair to say that we played most of the attacking shots and out right winners but we also made by far the majority of errors. In fact both Roger and Harry had attacking shots but rarely used them. When they did they tended to be winners.  After one such attacking success young Mark exclaimed “why don’t you play like that more often” to which Roger replied “because we’ve watched you”! Ouch.