My Opponent Surges Toward The End

Set 344:

Stuart v. P. at Caswell. Winner: To Be Determined? 6-2 (Stuart), 5-5.

My Mojo: The Reverse Alchemist: Gold At First, Then Lead.

OK, so I have been somewhat of a slug about blogging lately. But I have had some unexpected stuff come up that has taken up all my time. You know what they say about life being something that happens while you are busy making other plans. Right now that seems to be an understatement, and right now it seems to be just about all I can do to carve out the time to just play the darn things. Plus, it seems that playing tennis all the time is putting me behind on about a year's worth of chores and errands, which I am slowly starting to catch up on. At this moment, I have about fifteen minutes of time to blog. Then I look forward to launching into another busy day where I work all day, play some tennis, deal with the matter that is taking up more of my time and life energy than I would like right now, and hopefully sit down to blog again. But I digress.

P. was a hard hitter who put a lot of arm into his stroke. I am fairly used to playing people who play with that style, and so my methodical play of getting it all back and watching closely for the tough shots so I could get to them served me well for most of the match. Though he had a blistering first serve that, when it got in, gave me some trouble in returning a little more than half of the time, I felt like the first set and (I thought) the second set were going my way fairly easily.

In the second set, I was up 5-1, and we were about to run out of time on the court we had reserved. Then I made two critical mistakes. The first mistake was to try to rush things to get the match over with. That probably led me to make more errors that I would have liked to have made, when previously I had not been making a lot of errors. The second mistake was to fail to notice and respond to his change in strategy fast enough. Previously, he had been playing to try to cut off the points quickly. Now he was going for longer rallies, and my rushed play and greater error rate was making those rallies work in his favor. By the time I realized what was going on, he had evened it back up at 5-5, and I had no chance to respond, because we were out of time. Hopefully we will get to finish later.