My Streak Is Broken

Sets 99-101 (of 365):

Stuart vs. S. at His Apartments. Winner: S. 4-6, 6-3, 6-0.

My Mojo: Fighting Hard, Deflating Toward The End

Well, this guy finally broke my streak. I think that I had won twelve matches in a row before this one. I started out pretty good. In the first set, I was anticipating well, I was placing well, my serves were really on (though he was returning them fairly consistently), and was doing what I needed to do to win the set. There were some alarm bells for me, though. Like I said, he was returning my serves with good placement almost every time. And he had this killer down-the-line backhand from his add court to my deuce court that nailed me almost every time and hit right in the corner just on the inside of the line. And his strokes were powerful and consistent. Of course, I allowed my overconfidence to just ignore these warning signals. After all, I had just won the first set. I got ahead 4-2 and then just had to make par to win, which I did.

The second set started getting a little more difficult. He told me later that he started reading my game and started adjusting his play to my style, which at the time (and throughout the match) was to vary the pace and hit to different areas of the court. He said he had a hard time with me because I did not keep pace like most players do. Most players will try to keep a powerful cross-court rally going and then look for opportunities for approach shots, drop shots and down-the-line surprises. In this match, I was constantly just trying to put the ball in a surprising place, and then get the opponent off-balance so I can take control of the point. Worked great the first set. But after that, he started varying to try for placement rather than power; in other words, he started doing more of what I had been doing.

I got down 4-2 in the second set and was not able after that to focus enough to win. Also, after this I started having to play defense more than offense, which I am normally pretty good at. But it didn't seem to work out as well for me this time. I only won one game in the match from then on, though we did have a few games in which we went from deuce to ad several times.

In the third set, his backhand down-the-line zinger was coming more and more often as he got more confident with his game and his risks could pay off for him. This was such an effective shot because his body gave me almost no clue it was coming. Usually I can read cues in a player's body to who me where they are going to hit. In this case, his positioning looked about the same for the down-the-line shot as it did for the cross-court shot. He also occasionally had a pretty effective long pop-up slice that looked, when he hit it, like it would be a drop shot. I ran up for a couple of those only to have to backpedal rapidly and have the ball drop right at my feet in no-man's-land. Perhaps it would have been more effective for me to try to take those as midcourt volleys. As his game consolidated, mine fell apart. All my money shots were hitting just out. All my winners and offensive lobs were going a little long or wide. And that was the linchpin of how my game just fell apart. If they had been going in, I could have possibly built a more confident structure around that. But since I couldn't rely on my money shots, I didn't pull a coherent plan together. And my anticipation and positioning were not coming together as well and my timing seemed to be a little off. I just could not get it together for a single game in that last set, and lost 6-0.