Melbourn lost 6-9

After a bye in the first week of the season the 2nds belatedly rolled into action against Chantry 1sts, who made the shortish journey up from Bishop’s Stortford for the game.

The first match on court pitted Sean Hamilton against James Argent at third string. This proved to be an exciting match… and sometimes a little scary for the viewers from the balcony. Traffic issues, you see. The first two games were as close as anything… but at the crucial times Sean went conservative and simply hit the ball back to James, leading to two 13-15 defeats. Game three saw Sean begin to exploit James deep positioning with drops rather than attempts to hit the back corners from the front ones, and this worked well as he cruised the game 15-5. He also took the fourth comfortably enough, 15-10, despite an unusual call of a stroke away for dangerous play for fizzing the ball between James ear-lob and the side of his head – no actual contact, but Sean had already been warned not to play on in such circumstances. Feeling the marking was against him didn’t help Sean’s focus in the last, nor did the tension from the situation being tight; arguably going back to pumping the ball deep when the front court was gapping was what really mattered. Either way Sean dropped behind and lost it 11-15 to fall to a 3-2 loss.

This all took long enough that Colm O’Gorman’s second string match against Mark Douglass took place in parallel next door.
Colm’s confidence pre-match wasn’t particularly high having lost 3-0 to Mark at the back end of 2024, albeit in three tight games, but this one would prove to be different. Opening game was a tight affair, the lead changing hands early in the game and both players making mistakes under pressure. However at 10:10, Colm took a grip and won 5 of the next 6 rallies to take it 15:11. Colm was varying his game, forcing Mark into retrieving more and more. Colm kept up the pressure in the second quickly getting to 4:1 up and looking dominant, Mark had the experience though and gradually began to take more control, taking it to 8:10 in his favour and looking like he had wrestled the momentum. Colm however, just like in the first played positive attacking squash to win it 15:12, this time hitting a number of accurate forehand drive winners. Colm was in confident mood and was determined to keep the pressure on in the third, and dominated throughout, cruising to a 15:4 win and to match 3:0.

So it went to the top string encounter to decide the evening, which pitted Jan Brynjolffssen against Rory McGurk. The match started ice-cold, Jan serving out in rally one and Rory bouncing an attempted drop shot before the front wall in rally two. However from about 3-all Rory started to warm-up whilst Jan remained all-at-sea, resulting in a heavy game one loss (4-15). This continued into the opening phases of game two, which reached 8-3 before Jan finally began to get going; he had been too passive and too technical previously and needed to just be more dynamic to put Rory under pressure. The mindset change worked, not well enough to recover the second (11-15) but enough to rush Rory into errors in the third, which Jan won 15-11. However, two can play at the ‘make adjustments’ game… and Rory’s plan was the opposite to Jan’s; his time was being taken away and this was inducing mistakes, so his aim was to slow things back down. This worked well enough for the errors to flip back more to Jan’s racket instead, resulting in an 10-15 game loss, adding up to 1-3 overall and a 9-6 win for Chantry in terms of league points.