Game 51: May 6th

1-6

4-5

Rating:  reminder of how far to go


Venue: usual venue (beach court)


Oof a bit of a blow this one, it was a high quality game with handpicked people. 

I'd rate myself as the 3rd or 4th best of the quartet and I think that was accurate on the day

Players

1) Super Consistent Tennis Player - this guy never misses and punishes with top spin forehands

2) Super Aggressive Badminton Player - absolutely goes to net every opportunity, deals with overheads well. very few weaknesses for me

3) All-rounder who has sneaked ahead of me - very fit guy, consistent without a killer shot but has joined a Padel club and is playing a lot of games now

4) your correspondent


The Tennis guy and the All rounder are in the same Padel club and don't get the chance to play together so I paired up with Badminton guy.

Problem is, we have never ever clicked as a partnership. Lovely guy and I get on well with him but it doesn't work as a padel pairing.

I think the issue is that we both expect our partners to do a lot of running, so when we are together, there's a lot of "oh, have I to get that? oh?"

First set was terrible, I think 4 games went to Deuce and we lost them all. My partner was maybe trying to compensate for my lack of firepower and looking to close off points early but there's a lot of risk in that. For me, I made a drumbeat of unforced errors as I was against "good" players and so was trying to be too cute at times.

Second set we came back into it as I decided that someone has to fetch and carry so it may as well be me.We also switched sides and I was back to my preferred right side. We ran out of time for the second set as the rallies were lengthy but it was a much stronger performance. 

Just sometimes you don't click with a partner but it was still a good outing.

The one thing that jumped out was their tactic was to lob me a lob because my overheads are made of tissue paper. That was something to resolve

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