Melbourn lost 7-16

The 1sts were looking to back up a first win of the season when they travelled to Huntingdon, which St. Ivo now call their home.

The hosts were noticeably strong at the top of the order, and noticeably young as well as two talented teenagers* as Chris Shaw (1) took on Diego Pita and Vinod Duraikan (2) faced off with Mumin Bilen. Neither clash went well for the Melbourn players as both fell 3-0, though Vinod did managed to drag one of his games as far as a tie-break. That was as close as either he or Chris got to claiming a game. Game scores were 8-11, 4-11, 5-11 for Chris and 2-11, 3-11, 11-13 for Vinod.
* - each of these handy youths has a Melbourn connection: Mumin had played for us for a couple of seasons around three or four years ago. Diego hasn’t played for us… but his sister Sofia (another super young player) did in the summer.

Melbourn countered in the bottom strings as both Miles Jeanneret (4) and Mark Oppen (5) battled out tough 3-1 wins, Miles securing his victory over Matt Dixon in a crucial game four tie-break as he dug deep when his energy reserves appeared spent, and Mark dealing with the huge hitting of Grant Mankee as he recovered from losing his opening game to storm back and win. Miles scores were 11-8, 11-6, 4-11, 12-10 whilst Mark came through 7-11, 11-9, 11-7, 11-9.

The crucial encounter of the evening turned out to be the middle string, where Mike Herd (3) was up against Nick Giles, who is a very clean and classy player. It took Mike a while to make any inroads on Nick, but once he was up to speed games 2, 3 and 4 were all close. However only the middle of them went Mike’s way as he lost 3-1 (3-11, 8-11, 11-9, 7-11).

The final score was 16-7 in St. Ivo’s favour.