I love tennis

I try to avoid blogging about my own tennis matches - after all who's interested - but I had one of those games today, the kind of game you are lucky enough to play in once or twice a year.

I was playing my personal Nadal. We usually play on hard but today was indoor synthetic clay, which is slower and at times has an unpredictble bounce.

It was one of those truly special games where we both brought out the best in each other. It helped that it had only been 3 or 4 days since we last played so the level was good from the start and it just got better as we traded shots.

Don't get me wrong it wasn't all faultless technique (I wish) and fizzing winners (although there were a fair few of those). There was also some scrambling, lunging 'gets' as shots you didn't think would come back were somehow retrieved. Not to mention a few unforced errors...

My favourite moments were two serves to the ad side which went out wide and where returned to my forehand, allowing me to blast clean cross court winners. It's something you see the pro's do routinely, but usually I lack both the technique and confidence. Maybe my concerted effort to watch the ball is starting to work!

The only downside was that we only had the court for an hour so we couldn't play a full match. In fact we only managed 8 games, finishing with a marathon final game which must have lasted 10 minutes or more and saw me eventually break back to end all square at 4-4.

It was a killer to have to finish at the point but in a funny way it seemed fitting that noboby lost.

I was buzzing on the way home, reflecting on how days like these make up for all those games where you are battling against the wind, or strangely off the pace, or your serve is mis-firing. And it reminded me why we love tennis.