Match report by men's 1st team captain, Matthew Last
On Monday 10th January 2022 our Saxmundham men's 1st team played the Ipswich men's 2nd team at home - in what seemed like an age since our last league match.
It was good to finally get back on court playing again after the Christmas break; and in decent winter conditions it was a fairly ideal January day to have the return leg against Ipswich, at home.
Ipswich's first pair would end up being the strongest we've yet to play this season and became the first to take all four sets off our two pairs in pretty comfortable fashion beating Matt and Ewan 6-1, 6-3 and Anthony and Chris 6-0, 6-2.
Their pairing was a perfect mix of experience, craft and power leaving both Sax pairs with very few opportunities to get into the set. This would mean we'd have to get the clean sweep against their second pair to force the draw.
Anthony and Chris would go about this task pretty decisively and win 6-2, 6-4 despite strong resistance from the Ipswich second pairing. Matt and Ewan would go about it in a slightly different way. In what's becoming a bit of a pattern of late, we decided to make life difficult for ourselves and allowed them a 4-1 head start before finally showing from grit to claw back to 4-4 on our serve.
After all our hard work to get back into the match, Matt picked the perfect time to have a disastrous service game with the second serve disappearing to again make life needlessly difficult for ourselves.
Despite facing one set point, we managed to show some backbone again, and get the break before both pairs held to take us into a tie-break.
After a tentative set of tennis luckily both players were now swinging freely, and managed to race away with the tie-break 7-2. In the second set the Sax pair were always ahead, but chased all the way by a good Ipswich pair. We ended up winning 6-4 thanks to some dominant serving from Ewan who only dropped one point on serve that set!
Just like the away leg, it ended up being a 4-4 draw, on another enjoyable evening of tennis.
