Stick Tennis

So today I managed to find time to play two tennis matches. The first was against a good friend of mine, and was a nice excuse to test out my new racket. For many players the sheer variety of rackets and all their technical differences can be quite daunting. Not for me, for as long as I can remember I’ve always owned Prince rackets for tennis, squash and badminton. However, about 6 months ago I found myself in the unfortunate position of needing to buy a new racket after I accidently ruined the current one. I somehow was peer pressured into changing rackets to a Babolat (Pure Storm Ltd 95). On the face of it they were relatively similar, they both had the same 95” head size and were of a similar weight. However the Babolat was definitely slightly more head heavy and despite my best efforts I just coudn’t get to grips with it. In fact I was so bad with the racket I was going into the match with my friend Russ having lost the previous 4 matches convincingly. It reminded me of Novak Djokovic’s troubles when switching to Head back in 2009, although sadly Babolat hadn’t paid me a fortune to use their equipment. Last week I decided enough was enough and went out and ordered a new Prince EXO3 Rebel 95. Within 30 seconds of knocking up I felt like I was home and the racket just belonged. Despite my new racket I was still up against it though as we were playing on a local hardcourt; easily my least favourite surface whilst at the same time Russ’ favourite. The match didn’t start too well with me dropping my service to 15 and the first set never really got going for me. Too many unforced errors and far too many winners from him. Eventually I gave the set up 1-6. The second set started a little better with a beautiful inside-out forehand winner followed by a sumptuous dropshot. I couldn’t break though and as it turned out neither of us did for the whole set. He eventually took the tiebreaker to 4 after a couple of silly unforced errors early on. Still, I felt confident about my game for the first time in months which was the main thing and in the end its all a bit of fun.

My second match was against my new arch-nemesis, Willy Beacher of Stick Tennis fame. I’ve never been great at computer games but I do find Stick Tennis an entertaining waste of time. I’m too much of a scrooge to pay £2.99 to unlock the full game so after beating the first 4 players on ‘World Domination’ the only challenges left were on the practice courts. I breezed past all comers until I squared off with Willy. It seemed like he was barely trying and yet in our first encounter I won just a solitary point and even that was off an ace. I now know how Roger Federer felt in Miami back in 2004. In each of our previous matches prior to today Willy had dominated me and my previous best score was 1-6. Never deflated though I raced to a 40-0 lead and after shanking a forehand wide I eventually won the game to 15. That was the first time I had managed to win the opening service game – cue the 24 points in a row against. But wait, 3 thunderous returns, 2 down the line and 1 cross-court and Willy was teetering. Scoreboard pressure. After a seemingly never ending rally to put Gilles Simon to shame Willy went long and I had the break 2*-0! Nobody beats me 32 times in a row. However a suspect line call that went his way seemed to be the signal for him to go on a rampage and before I knew it I was 2-5* down. I did manage to break back, perhaps Willy choked, I don’t know but either way it didn’t matter ad I tamely handed the break and with it the match back. Still, I’m improving.

Edit: See here for a post explaining how I finally did it.

Virtual tennis matches probably aren’t of interest to many people so I apologise but I had to fill the post up with something in addition to the main purpose of this post which is the question: can anyone tell me if it is possible to add non blogger/wordpress blogs such as http://wearetennis.com/en/blog to your blogroll? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Cheers.