Today I played Jay (Mike) at his home court, Bardmoor. Me and him have quite the history which you could read on this blog. I have played him 3 times now. I won the 1st, he got the 2nd and today he won the 3rd meeting.

Mentally I had really put too much pressure on myself for this match. I knew it was going to be tough and I wanted to win badly. We played in the morning which is not something I prefer but that was not really a major factor. During the first set I was really nervous, I was playing sporadically and I my backhand was very bad. I do not think I got 1 backhand in during the 1st set. The points were close and there were several Deuce games but in the end I failed to win any games.

During the 2nd set I changed my grip on my backhand to a flatter, safer slice type shot. This seemed to help a lot. I won my 1st service game and broke his serve early. At one point I was up 3-1 during the 2nd. Things started going south for me though. He seemed to catch on to the aggressive play and was hitting lots of good overheads. Most of them I just did not even try to get because they looked close but I don't think he missed many. There were some which I stepped back and got out of the air but not too many. I really could have won this set, it was just a matter of 1-2 points honestly. I think losing the first set so badly effected me mentally and him positively as well. At 5-5 he managed to break my serve. During the 6-5 game he got some lucky shots in and I made some errors at the critical moment.

Could I have won ? The answer is most certainly Yes. I need to work on my backhand even more so I have enough confidence in it during big games like this. I recall having a similar problems during the playoffs. It is the shots you are not good at that break down badly during the pressure matches. My other shots were pretty good, there were times I was not stepping up to the ball and played too safe so this is something else I need to work with.

I lost 0-6, 5-7 ouch!

BTW, his wife was there watching again but she was not a factor at all. She stayed well off the court and never caused a disruption of any kind.