Mens Feathers vs Abbeydale C, 10 Feb 2013
Simon O & Simon T David P | Tipue M A & Gavin B | Aaron G & David W
Today’s excuse: I don’t know… my excuse for not knowing the excuse is that I couldn’t get there. This snow is starting to annoy.
My car broke yesterday night, and attempts to nurse it back to life with fresh oil failed this morning, so Simon O kindly offered to give me a lift. Noticing the snow forecast, I kept an eye out for signs of bad road conditions. Not a speck of snow settled in my village, and all looked well… until Simon O arrived a little later than expected after sliding gracefully down the hill. Not keen to attempt the ski course later in the evening it seemed best to send Simon O quickly back to Sheffield and leave me to stay officially snowed in for the evening, and so David P was recruited with minus two minutes’ notice.
As for what happened at the match I therefore don’t know. So I will write fiction instead to describe what I think probably happened.
Tipue and Gavin, keen to take on the responsibility of being the only proper feathers team pair, played their best badminton of the year. With Tipue’s rock-solid defence, and Gavin’s varied attacking shots, they tore through each opposition pair, winning with ease, including the game against the opposition third pair which they took 21-6, 21-0.
Aaron and David, feeling the cold a little from their snowy journeys to the match, warmed up with some smashes. With Aaron’s 15ft reach, his smashes came down almost vertically and were unreturnable. David’s smash, while flatter, was at such a speed that one of them passed clean through the opponent’s strings. They won each game in straight sets as well, their best game being 21-4, 21-4, where all eight points lost were from David hitting his smash out of the back deliberately in order to make dents in the back wall in the shape of a smiley face.
Simon O, after his 100-mile round trip from Sheffield to Sheffield via Derbyshire, and David, after his remarkably fast transformation from Sunday Evening DIY Genius to Sunday Evening Badminton-Playing Marvel, were a little tired before they started, so fared just slightly less well, only winning their opening game 21-13, 21-10. After that, Simon started up his impossibly tight net shots, and David won five points in a row with a round-the-back-reverse-slice-backhand-drop-shot that the opposition found truely unfathomable. With their opponents bamboozled, they went on to win their other games comfortably, and after a slight confusion with the score mid-game, their final game went down as a 21 – 8, 21 – -1 victory.
So after a thrilling match, the result was a fantastic 9-0 to Oakbrook, the local hat market saw prices rocket after everyone that had eaten their had to go and buy a new one because it was cold outside, and the devil was seen shopping in B & Q for a patio heater.
Hmm, seems that this was a little optimistic – not in terms of the badminton which I’m sure was just how I described, but in terms of Simon O just going back from my house to Abbeydale without a problem. Instead I got a cut-off phone call from him saying he’d got stuck on the way :-S Hopefully he’s not going to turn into a snowman :-S *curses Mother Nature and apologies profusely to Simon O*
Edit: apparently he’s over the hill now (literally, unlike his usual badminton partner to whom that applies metaphorically) – I guess that means that at the very least he can just slide sideways all the way down the hill into Abbeydale 🙂 So all of you who’d gone out to look for the Abominable Sinoman can go home again.
Alas it was not so. Simon eventually made it to Abbeydale around 8.25pm once he’d been dug out of the snow. We had to play three rubbers in quick succession and didn’t manage success in any of them. We were competitive but perhaps not quite in the right mindset. I didn’t get the opportunity to check on the scores from the other pairs (I was looking outside for Simon and also taking note of the whether the snow was going to settle) but I don’t think they were in the positive.