The tournament has started, though only three matches had been played, as of Saturday night.
In the Men’s Singles, played on Thursday, Simon Defoe played Ben Torns in the round of 64 preliminary matches. Simon is new this year, but has a decent serve and ground strokes. He also has the advantage of height, allowing him to dominate at the net, at least at doubles.
Ben is now a student who previously played social tennis at West Heath as a junior. He can hit the ball very hard, on both serve and ground strokes, but with that comes inconsistency.
Simon reported that Ben turned down the pace somewhat, in order to hit fewer losers, and the result was that Ben won 6-3 6-2.
On Friday, Josh Woodyard and Kerry Karageorgis played in another R64 preliminary Men’s Singles. Kerry has been playing a lot, mainly on the hard courts. Further, he is a leftie, which takes a bit of getting used to, especially in singles. Here’s the match report from Josh, supplied via Kerry:-
“Kerry secured a convincing 6-2 6-1 victory. His tactical awareness proved decisive, repeatedly exposing Josh’s difficulty handling changes in pace, blocked shots and slice.”
“Josh struggled to maintain consistency when rallies deviated from a steady rhythm, leading to a high volume of unforced errors. Kerry capitalized effectively, also with a few extraordinary efforts on key points to maintain momentum and close out both sets comfortably”
On Saturday evening there was a Mixed Doubles between Henry Lloyd-Hughes & Liz Hill, and Sultan Gangji & Jen Ananda-Rajan, the fourth seeds. Various spectators got to know about it and put in an appearance.
Henry & Liz were playing the role of David against Goliath here, and had not played together before. Liz said she was relying on Henry, who is a leftie, to do most of the running, and indeed he obliged. Henry and Liz tried to take advantage when Sultan and Jen both approached the net, by lobbing. This was reasonably effective, but didn’t yield enough points on its own.
Jen and Sultan generally just kept putting the ball back in court, often into places where the opponents weren’t, though Henry go to a number of these balls. They didn’t make too many mistakes, but there were enough of them, along with the challenger lobs, to give the challengers two games for a 6-1 6-1 victory to Sultan and Jen.
