Match Report
Early days, but this may go down as one of the shock results of the season. One walkover aside, we had never previously beaten Morpeth A.
You recently reminded teams that the actual start time for matches at the Abbey is 18:15 and not the perceived 18:30 as in the Central League. PRO are notoriously late finishers and so with this in mind I hastened Duncan, the first of their players to arrive, to the table for the opening match of the evening which still started at 18:30.
Duncan was a little short of practice on the night and it duly showed as I won comfortably in three straight sets.
Next up was Jai against Chris. Despite a minor blip in the second, another comfortable victory for PRO, this time in 4 sets.
I faced the unpredictable Adam in the third match of the night. Adam is one of those players that blows very hot and cold, hence the unpredictability. When he is hot, he can hit some incredibly unreturnable powerful shots from both flanks. When he is cold, he is susceptible to making errors. Very much the case in his match against me, eventually coming through 11-8 in the deciding end.
With Ronnie arriving later, due to work commitments, he opened the fourth match of the night, in a ding dong battle against Duncan. At 2 sets all Duncan raced into a 6-2 lead in the deciding end. Ronnie rallied to take the next six points to go ahead 8-6 and then incredibly Duncan took the last 5 points to win 11-8.
All square after 4 games, everything pointed to a close match. Next up was Jai against Adam. the turning point in this one came in the third end with Jai leading 8-4. Adam won the next 7 points to win the third set and eventually came through in 4 ends.
Matches 6, 7 and 8 were all relatively straight forward with straight set victories. The final match of the night saw Adam complete his hat-trick of victories by beating Ronnie in 4 sets.
And so, with the match poised in PRO's favour at 5-4 we entered the final match of the evening. Morpeth could still avoid defeat by winning the doubles. Sadly it was not to be. PRO won in 4 sets to record their first victory of the season.
A moral boosting victory for PRO in our perennial battle against relegation.
John
Written by: John Crawford
