Melbourn lost 6-9

Two teams with opening week wins clashed as the Seconds welcomed our equivalent from Letchworth to Melbourn.

First up was El Bandido, Moises Estrelles Navarro (3). He was taking on/drawing a ‘M’ on to the stomach of Paul Davidson (who knew you could do that with a racquet?!?). The pattern to come was apparent from pretty well the opening three shots of the match – Moises served, Paul went for an immediate short kill, Moises raced forward and picked it up, Paul looked concerned. And that pattern was to be repeated for much of the next half-hour… apart from the bits where Moises got a bit bored and tried to kill himself. Those didn’t go so well, but when Moises relied on his legs and his speed he took Paul’s game away from him, Moises winning 15-8, 15-8, 15-8.

At this point we spilt on to two courts, so I only know the outcome of Colm O’Gorman’s match at second string against Nishan Ramnarain second hand and by the comments of the players when they were outside the court. Which was that Colm was being Colm, keeping the rallies short, using his retrieving and counterpunching skills and looking for unlikely short reverse angles thanks to his strong wrist/adapted hurling skills. For two out of three games this worked, Colm establishing a 2-1 lead, but Nish was gradually wearing the Melbourn skipper out by looking for extended up-and-down-the-wall rallies and in games four and five a tired Colm was just failing to execute. It was still close, but it added up to a 15-10, 12-15, 15-8, 12-15, 12-15 defeat.

Going on concurrently with the second string was the top string match, which pitted Jan Brynjolffssen (1) against Jason Attwood. Both players had clearly had significant amounts of coaching in the past as this was quite a classical match, lots of rallies up and down the backhand wall. There was little in it in game one until Jan benefitted from some unexpected unforced errors from Jason to go 1-0 up. A favour Jan then returned in game two to level things up. Oops. But it wasn’t that one causing lack of sleep afterwards – no, this was the butchered chance at 14-13 in the third when Jan had a clear backhand drop shot chance to win the game… only to skew it, catch the side wall first and end up standing in the way to give away a stroke. D’Oh! Two points later it was 2-1 to Jason and despite Jan putting together four clinical rallies to open up game four with a 4-0 lead that tie-breaker in game three proved the decisive moment as Jan lost 15-12, 10-15, 14-16, 9-15.

That meant an overall 9-6 win for Letchworth – disappointing, but three good games and everyone seemed to enjoy the evening. Which, surely, is the point of County Division 4 Squash.