There was a forum wide groan when the draw was made – Jonny and Jamie have had some successes building up again on the Challenger tour and some tough losses when they’ve gotten into the main tour draws.
As it was we were a bit early and we managed to get a spot by the benches to catch the end of Hutchins/Kerr v Bogdanovic/Slabinsky
We were stood chatting a bit to Laura Fleming – Colin’s sister and all around was filling up quite quickly...
For all the discussion of this perhaps being a foregone conclusion – Jamie and Jonny broke the Nestor serve in the first game!
Jamie was struggling to keep his serve though, and so the trading breaks began…
The first set slipped away from them quite quickly.
The second set though – the guys started strongly, and found much more consistency. It was immediately more competitive a set as they settled into their game
The guys took the TB strongly … hope was up.
Somewhere in all this – the Queen appeared on the balcony with a couple of the AELTC hierarchy and was looking over this court as the game was going on –
And then Andy Murray and Jarkko Nieminen were introduced to the Queen on the balcony
The guys dropped their intensity a bit but stayed toe-to-toe … Nestor seemed to be the weaker of the two… and they had their chances to break.
Instead it went to another TieBreak – which went the way of the defending champs
At this point I needed to get off my feet which were burning! So we headed to Café Pergola for some tea …
The Isner/Mahut match had resumed and the games were marching on… and on… and on…
I was going cross-eyed because I fully expected Jamie and Jonny to go down in the 4th after losing the TB… and of course we were sat there when Isner FINALLY got the result…
We headed back out to try and catch the end of the Doubles match and get a position to see JJ in the dubs – Court 6 was HEAVING by this point – we were stood maybe a couple back from Judy in the corner and apart from seeing the odd racquet flying about for a serve we had to rely on the reactions of the crowd!
They fought hard – Jamie fought off match points on his serve time and time again… Jonny held his serve well time and time again and this could have gone either way – Jonny was so unlucky to be broken on his serve for the match and they took the #1 seeds to 5 sets, and they had to get to 15-13 for the win.
At the time of writing, we know now that Nestor/Zimonjic went out to another Brit paring next round.
Jamie and Jonny really need to take confidence from this – they fought hard – they CAN come through the tough TBs (good practice for those MTBs on the tour).
Nice touch at the end with Nenad patting Jamie on the shoulder at the net… some hard grafting days ahead but I think they should build on this… they acquitted themselves very well and should be proud of that performance.
Nenad...mmmmmm.
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