SO CLOSE BUT SO FAR

7.29 and POPPS are confident of a whitewash victory due to the no show of the opposition who we believe to have heard of our fearsome reputation and decided there was little point in actually playing the game.

7.30 they’ve turned up and its downhill from here on.

9.30 it’s all over and POPPS have slumped and slithered to defeat, the final numbers being a 9 and a 0 which my readers can rearrange in any manner they see fit (or unfit as might be more appropriate.)

David and Peter both managed to throw away winning leads (and collars) with great aplomb due more to a lack of concentration and experience rather than any particular physical defects of which the list is too long to enumerate. Two five set games and three four set ones were lost here. More match practice required for these two mongrels.

Alan played to the best of his ability and better than at our practice sessions but was somewhat out of his class, a kind of family cross breed inadvertently entered at Crufts. Again, more training required here.

However Alan’s analysis of our defeat was spot on…it was clearly due to the noise and the bright shirts sported by players on adjacent tables. I should add that someone whose name shall not be mentioned, but it begins with P, insisted, without due process, that we should move from our normal home table (yes the one where we have gained all those outstanding successes) to a different and totally inferior one where we were unable to utilise our knowledge of the prevailing conditions on our usual home show ring.

So, that’s all for now from your newshound.

KEEP ON PRACTISING

In keeping with tradition for summer league matches Popps lost to their opponents 2 sets to 8. There were five aspects to this defeat – it was very hot, the combined ages of Lions was probably about 135 years less than the Popps team of David, John and Terry, youngsters don’t respect their elders these days, Terry was playing again after a 3 week break, and they were better than us. In fact, on reflection, we did remarkably well.

The two wins were David and John beating Hannah. Terry got close, by his standards, losing the first two games 10-12 but collapsed somewhat in the third 7-ll once Hannah had learnt to ignore his gurning and simulated heart attacks. Other notable successes where that all of us took the third game off their number one player Josh although against John and Terry he went on the win the fourth and final games fairly comfortably. David took him to five games before losing in a very good close match. David also took Ben to five games and was undoubtedly our best player

You can often tell what coaching a team gets from its style of play. Lions clearly have a specialist ‘pushing’ coach. Most rallies were won by out-pushing us and displaying patience. The all had good attacking shots as well but tended to use them sparingly and only when a clear chance had been achieved. When they went for badly judged winners they were just as likely as us to miss. It’s just that we did it far more often. Even when we had succeeded in setting up a good attacking opportunity to attack our conversion rate was less than theirs and many points went begging for the lack of a few millimetres of table. However, I don’t see this as a reason for ignoring attacking chances. This would just lead to negativity and a one dimensional strategy. What we need to do is to improve our technique on the attacking shots and this needs coaching, practice and playing them in matches when the opportunities arise. We all played very good winners at times but probably only converted about 20% or our chances. Just raising this to 40% and reducing the number of ‘no hoper’ smashes would transform our prospects.