Barely Over The Edge

Sets 258-259:

Stuart v. M. at Patterson Park. Winner: Stuart 7-6(5), 4-6, 10-7 match tiebreak

My Mojo: Below Average.

I felt like I could not get it together at all today. I did manage to do what I needed to do at crucial points to barely win the match, but it didn't feel right at all. I was making a huge number of errors, and my shots just did not seem to go where I wanted them to go.

In the first set, I was just barely keeping pace with him. I got ahead, but then he caught up, and I could not break out at all. I could not get anything aggressive going because my shots were so awful. I barely squeaked out the first set on a set tiebreak. I was happy that I managed to pull out the win, but not happy with the way I was playing. In the second set, things went downhill for me a little, and things got a little better for my opponent, though we were still doing the neck-and-neck thing throughout the first part of the set. He broke out in the middle of the set, and stayed ahead to win and split.

He wanted to play a tiebreak after we split sets, and at first I said that I really didn't want to, but after he said that he needed to be somewhere else and didn't think the match would take so long (it was nearly three hours long), I went ahead and agreed to play a tiebreak. At first he thought we were playing to seven, but I pointed out that a match tiebreak was to ten. I almost regretted correcting him later as I had handily won what would have been a seven-pointer, but he started building momentum after that. I did manage to pull out the last couple points of the tiebreak to win the tiebreak and the match. I felt like that was too close for comfort, though I've played matches that close before and not been on edge about it.