The biggest match of the season so far in which the Spencer Club squash centre of excellence managed to field their best starting line up and it was definitely required!

First up was the long distance commuter Alex who kindly made his way back from Southampton to play at third string and mirrored last week’s impressive result of a 27/4 3-0 victory in a short space of time before quite rightly heading off in advance of another 5am commute.  Thanks so much to Alex for everything this season and for agreeing to play last night – we hope that the commute from Winchester to future Spencer Club matches is not too painful...!

At the same time, Niall lined up at second string.  Not many people have bad hangovers at 8pm on a Monday night however Niall somehow achieved this after the lads annual Sunday night drinking session which proved a bad warm-up for the biggest game of the season!  Combine this with the fact that Niall was playing against the St Georges Hill gym fitness coach and the old saying “squash is a great hangover cure” was clearly not going to be the case on this occasion.  Niall started well but got clawed back and then as he stated to make his way back into the match he suffered an ankle injury which made the task unachievable from there onwards.  His first defeat as a Spencer Club player which is an impressive record and the highlight of the night was definitely his washing up performance in the post-match curry session...!

Meanwhile, Iain kicked off his match at fifth string against a 14-year old girl who was seen finishing off some of her homework during Alex’s first few sets.  Fresh from a pro-active Sunday morning 9.15am training session which Iain felt would continue to help both his line & length plus fitness, and also full of confidence after having been described as “unbeatable” by Alex only two weeks earlier, Iain stormed to a 2-0 lead in a never-the-less very competitive match.   As his opponent finalised the last section of her maths algebra assignment during the second set and started to focus on her squash a bit more, the match suddenly changed to the extent that Iain lost the ability to win any more points.  In fact, Iain managed to lose the last three sets 27/4 in a 3-2 defeat and quite rightly feared the worst in the following morning’s match report.  However, sometimes in life there is no need to tease somebody in a match report – they say that the best things in life are free but watching Iain lose 27/4 to a 14-year old girl (admittedly the UK number 1 in the Under 15 category) was simply priceless...!!!  That said, we are all very much looking forward to the end of season awards to see what prize Iain wins...

With Spencer Club finding themselves in an unusual position of being 2-1 down after three matches and therefore needing to win the last two to claim overall victory, Dan went on at first string against an in-form opponent called Mark who “played out of his skin”.  Having won the first game, Dan then went 2-1 down after two long sets which clearly took their toll on his opponent.  This was the point where Dan turned the match round and took the fourth 9/0.  Unfortunately the fifth set didn’t quite start as planned and Dan went 6/0 down from the off only to find out from Richard that we needed this match to have any chance of claiming overall victory.  Fortunately, Dan pulled back to 7/6 in another complete turnaround only to go 8/7 down and face match point.  A few good shots and suddenly a 3/2 Spencer Club victory was realised thanks to a 10/8 win in the fifth and the dream was kept alive!

Richard then went on at fourth string and won convincingly against a player who was about five times the age of Iain’s opponent but who had some very good shots.  A 3-0 win courtesy of a solid performance wrapped up the overall Spencer Club victory of 15 points to 8 therefore gaining us seven points on our biggest rivals in a match which really could have gone either way.

The link to the league table is  http://county.leaguemaster.co.uk/ (division 8B) and the geek sheet attached showing results for all matches this season.  A wonderful end to a fantastic first half of the season sees us top of the league with 8 wins from 8 and 146 points out of a possible 152.  As previously noted, still a long way to go as both Kingfisher and St Georges Hill are both beating the other teams as well meaning that we need to take our current momentum into the new year.  Next up Cheam on w/c 12/1 and then a huge match against Kingfisher on 20/1.

Note that there is no training session on Monday but we still have the courts booked and I’ll head down if anybody fancies a hit.  For those of you who can’t make Monday, have a great Christmas break and see you all in January!

Dan