Popps turned out Terry, John and Peter for this return match against Ram 2. To cut a long story short we lost 2 sets to 7 and, although this was an improvement on our first meeting with Rams when we lost 1 – 8 last October, it was a slightly disappointing result. I think it is fair to say we should have one at least one more set and maybe even more. But we didn’t, of course. The Rams team was made up of mainly experience and a bit of (relatively speaking) youth. Youth -  in the form of Scott – simply outplayed us with only John  flattering to deceive by taking a single game off him. Terry got close in another losing 12 – 14 in the 3rd game, having lost the first two, but Scott was just too strong. He was a good attacking player with the happy knack (or unhappy for us) of being able to play hard drives into the midriff area where, Terry in particular, would lose sight of the ball completely as it disappeared into the rarely seen (by him) area below his tummy. Donald and Rodney, by contrast, relied on age, experience and low cunning to beat us. Their game was largely defensive and they contented themselves with pushing the ball back with back spin and waiting for us to make errors. Usually they didn’t have too long to wait! Don won all three of his sets with Peter taking a solitary game off him, the first one, 12 – 10, eventually losing 1 game to 3 although the 4th and last went to 11-13. The other 2 games were very close too so if the set could have been forced into a 5th game there would have been a good chance of securing another valuable victory. Rod played a similar game to Don but gave a few more opportunities to attack him. John’s game came good here, his serve which is very hard to return when it is going well, came on song and he managed to beat Rod 3 games to nil – our first win of the night!  Terry also secured a win with a number of good attacking shots, some rarely seen patience, but also copious deployment of his more specialised net cord and edge shots. This match went to 5 games with Rod taking the 2nd and 3rd games but fortunately Terry winning the 5th. And hence the final match score of 2 sets to 7.  As always the match was played in a splendid spirit (despite some discussion on the finer points of legal serving!) . It was encouraging to see Peter play a little more aggressivelyy at times and Terry exercising a little patience for a change. Slowly but surely experience is helping us get a bit more balance and consistency in our game. However, knowing what to do and actually doing it are two different things.