Match report by Men's 1st team captain, Matthew Last
The match: Saxmundham Men's 1st team v Ipswich Men's 3rd team
The league: Ipswich Division 4 Men's
Date: Friday 20th May 2022
Team
Matt Last & Ewan Threadkell
Anthony Tolman & Ian Flowers
Martin Lovick & Andrew Crane
Unavailable team members Ewan: working in Waitrose
Chris: in Paris
Skitch: in Thailand
Ian Portal: probably off winning another tournament somewhere Final score 7-2 to Saxmundham
This was the Men's 1st team's first away game of the season, which saw Sax sweep down the A12 to the mighty Henley Road, home of Ipswich Sports Club.
After a rather miserable and wet day, the match was just about timed well, with only the odd spit of rain on an otherwise pretty decent night for tennis. One pair would have more than a decent night, going the whole evening without dropping a game! 24 games played, 24 games won by the powerhouse Anthony and our hero for the night Ian!
Not a player to struggle on any surface, Anthony destroyed the opposition with a constant barrage of massive forehands, backed up brilliantly with the precision and consistency of Ian who saved the day for Sax with a late call up, despite difficult circumstances. Over to the number 1 pair... who never like to do things quite as straightforwardly.
As often is the case, myself and Ewan yet again allowed our opposition to get a healthy head start, going 4-1 down. We finally got going thanks to some savage power-play from Ewan, who started to get used to the change of surface, and started hitting winners more and more frequently.
This would allow us to very quickly turn the tide, and group together 7 games in a row to clinch the set, 8-4. The next two sets were well-battled by the opposition however, fairly comfortably, in fact, Ewan almost went the entire set without dropping a point on serve - right up until the set point where he set up an easy volley... only for me to try and be too clever with it and drop it plum in the net... (Welcome to our world, Matt - Ed.)
It was always going to be a tough ask for Martin and Drew, coming up a couple of leagues from the 2nd team, however thanks to their strength and commitment to the club, we had total faith they'd give it their all. They lost the first two sets 8-3 , however one young player (only 13!!) played a blinder to make the going tough for the Sax pair. They saved their best for last though, with a mammoth final set, going the distance to win on a tie-break in front of all the fans and players who'd finished their games at least half an hour beforehand.
Next up, Bramford away!
