Blog

01/02/2011

AUSTRALIA TRIP

Hi folks!

This is my first longer bloq this year and I hope you'll enjoy reading it.

After my pre-season in Prague I spent Christmas in Graz with my parents and my relatives. Already on the 27th, I flew to Brisbane one week earlier to prepare for the tournament.

We were in good shape and it was really bad luck that we lost our first round. We played this tournament for teh first time and were actually very surprised to see that it was, in fact, an indoor tournament. 3 match courts are covered by a roof!

We played our first round against Guccione/Ball, one of the hardest serving teams on the Tour. We lost the match like 8-10 and it was a really high quality match. Nobody had any double faults, the opponents were serving 75% of first serves in and their second serve was almost like the first. It was sad that we lost that match but there is nothing we could do, but accept it and look forward to the next tournament.

I didn't know what we gonna do next week because Lucas was waiting to get in the main draw to Auckland or Sydney. He eventually decided to play Sydney qualies and we competed there in doubles too. We won our first round against Aussie wildcards and second round we played against Dlouhy-Hanley, who won the Brisbane tournament. Sadly, I injured my leg during the practise the day before and I could hardly run in that match. We almost won it having a match point on Lucas's serve but we could not finish the match and lost it extremely close, 13-11.

Right away after the match I went to the ATP physio to attend to my leg problem. He used a new method of treating injuries he learnt a few weeks earlier and it was really great because I felt much less pain on the next day and in 3 day I could practise (you can imagine how much I was worried about my Aussie Open appearance).

After we saw our draw and our first opponents, we knew it's not gonna be an easy round because they played in Auckland final and some teams told me they played really well there. But Lucas played also great in singles before and I was practising hard and also hitting the ball very well. So the first round match against Huss/Brunstroem we started nervously, but after the second game the machine started going. We hit a few great returns and played our service games very well. We faced our first match point after 52 minutes and closed it with a 6-3 6-1 win. We were very happy after our first performance in Melbourne because we also had a great harmony on court which is very important for doubles.

Next round we played against Aussie wildcards named Groth (he's probably the hardest server on Tour) and Jones. We knew they could be dangerous if they served good. Our opponents got very nevous after we broke them in the 3rd game. Groth served me a winner serve with 230 km/h. That hurt to return it :-) We were very focused on that match because we had almost the whole Mararet Court Arena against us, but we also had our fan box and friends there. We played a very solid match again and beat them under 1 hour, 6-1 6-3. The not-so-funny thing was that I lost a bet that we would do our warm-up exercise for our friends if we win a match on a big court. So here it is folks and enjoy:  www.youtube.com/watch

After that amusing dance, we went to the gym and did a little biking, stretching, massage and relax.

For a place in the quarters we were facing Starace/Bracciali. We knew that Starace doesn't like to play against us but Bracciali is a very talented player and I was also watching their previous round to get some info about their game. We also never played against them as a team and especially not on hardcourts. It was a very opened game till 3-all, but then Starace was pissed off by the referee on the first point in his service game as the referee called 'let' twice in a row. But anyway we knew this is our chance. He was angry and made 2 easy mistakes in that game. We hit 2 winners and that was the break for us and we closed the first set with 63. After that we got better in the match and played really great tennis. Again we just lost 4 games and won the match 63 61 after over 1 hour-match.

To be continued.