London Sutton August 2012

My home tournament, playing it for the 6th time: more than I played in any other tournament. I still count the Sutton-London tournament as my home tournament, even though I now live in Brighton: it is still my closest tournament.

Once again it is held at the beautiful venue in Sutton: www.suttontennisacademy.com

This is my final tournament in 2012: simply because I can not afford any more trips.
Unless a sudden generous sponsor pops up...

I entered in C-Singles and C-Doubles: my doubles partner is Tony, American guy who lives in Switzerland. It will be a nice reunion with a lovely friend :-)
It is nice to also have a Consolation round in the doubles, to guarantee me at least 4 matches in total.
O and no 3rd sets being played: replaced by a super tie-break: tie-break until 10.


C-Singles first round I had a bye, luck of the draw. My 2nd round opponent was Vivek, Londoner:

He was way too good for me, even though a string of my racket broke early in the match and had to continue with my back up racket: 1-6, 2-6.

Our first round C-Doubles match was against Londoners Darren & Ralph; they were the nr 4 seeds.
In a 2 and a half hour match we only just lost:
5-7, 6-2 (after 0-2 down) and 8-10 in the super tie-break, after having been 0-5 down and coming back to 8-9.

Next day was Consolation Round day. My first round match was against Scotsman Lachlan.
I won 8-4! It went even until 4-4 but then Lachlan had no answer against my solid play.

So, into the next round: Spanish guy Manuel was my opponent and he was the nr 5 seed, so surprisingly he lost in his first round. I lost 6-8 after I was 3-0 and 6-4 up. But after 6-4,  Manuel showed his true class and I had no chance.

The Doubles Consolation Round was just 1 match: the FINAL, because all other teams pulled out of the Consolation. Their loss.....
We played the Consolation Final against good friend Gilles and Erik the Viking.
The match lasted over 2 hours, but Tony & I won!
The final score was 5-7, 6-2 (after 0-2 down) and 10-5 in the super tie-break.

Proud owners of the C-Singles Consolation Winners' trophy. A video of the award ceremony will be uploaded later, that is if Google Blogger/Blogspot will allow me to do so...

And no blog posting would be complete without a close up of my well earned and derserved trophy:

I would like to thank Dexter and Hiroshi for using my camera phone like a pro!

Talking about pro: Rob Falconer was the official tournament photographer, and he also took some action shots of me. This was during my first match against Vivek.
You can see I am actually with both feet at least 10cm off the ground!

Thank you Rob for these shots, and also thank you for agreeing for me to advertise you on my blog.

 

If you think you were photographed on court playing at the tournament and would like to see or buy some of the images, please email Rob Falconer Event Photography on robf.enquiry@gmail.com with a thumbnail or small facepic of yourself for visual identification, and Rob will put your pictures in an online gallery for you. He has a gallery of 400 pictures from the tournament available, on Rob's website:

 http://www.zen25626.zen.co.uk/tli2012




The results in C-Singles and C-Doubles:

http://glta.tournamentsoftware.com/sport/draw.aspx?id=E482D30B-9F7B-47C3-8ACA-5CF3E5D8F583&draw=19

http://glta.tournamentsoftware.com/sport/draw.aspx?id=E482D30B-9F7B-47C3-8ACA-5CF3E5D8F583&draw=14


This is an overview of my matches and my statistics:

http://glta.tournamentsoftware.com/sport/player.aspx?id=E482D30B-9F7B-47C3-8ACA-5CF3E5D8F583&player=3