Fours home v David Lloyd(Tue, Oct 11,'11)

Grange 4s get off the mark

The 4s are off and running with an excellent win over newly promoted David Lloyd 2s who had quite a few new faces from the team last year.

First on court for Grange were me, Brian Sloan, playing at 3 and Mike Douglas at 2. Well I don’t know what inspired both Mike and I but it became a contest to see who could finish their match first! Both of us winning 3-0 and only conceding an average of 3 points per game. I am not sure Alan and Elaine from DLL quite new what had hit them! A great start for the team.

Next up were Tom McEwan making his Grange debut at 4 and Richard Nisbet playing at 1. I was refereeing Tom’s match and he took the first 9-5 looking comfortable and playing well. The second game was a ding dong game which could have gone either way however with Tom serving to stay in the game at 6-8 I had to call him for a foot fault! It must be said I had spoken to Tom earlier about his tendency to foot fault from the right hand service box however it clearly threw him and he went on to lose the game. Unfortunately Tom never recovered and lost the next two games 9-0, 9-0 but his opponent Blair Lochie played some superb squash in these two games and I would be very surprised if he continued to play at no 4 in the future. Serving practice for Tom at Team Training this Sunday recommended! On the other court a monumental tie was unravelling. On paper it looked quite easy to start with for Richard, taking the first two games 9-2 & 9-6 however the two games lasted over 35 minutes! At the end of the second the very useful Paul Sherry went to shake hands with Richard thinking he had just lost 3-0 given the length of time he had been on court! It might have been some cute psychology on Paul’s part as he went on to take the next 3 games 9-3, 9-4 and 9-6 however Richard was in every game and it was a blinder of a match.

Last up for the Grange was Peter Roberts who had finished work late arriving at 8.15pm. Pete took to the court against David Lloyd’s youth policy in the shape of 15 year old Andrew Green whose dad Alan I had played earlier. Well Pete gave no let up for Andrew’s younger years and won fairly comfortable 3-0. It must be said if you weren’t actually watching the game you would have thought Pete was murdering Andrew such were the screams and shouts coming from the court as young Andrew was getting more upset with himself. Even dad couldn’t calm him down! Andrew that is what team squash does to you, your time will come.

All in all an excellent win for the 4’s, 17 - 6.

Let us hope we can build on this momentum hopefully with the availability of even more players the next week (which is the week after next, school break next week).