Wednesday night (7 Jan) saw a battle of the sexes between Academy Badminton and DL Reds with honors just about even. Our men faced them away at their place and went down 4-2, while the ladies welcomed them to The Park and went one better than last season’s 5-1 win, handing out a 6-0 thrashing. In fact, while the men’s matches were mostly close run affairs, the women only narrowly missed out on a whitewash with five of the six sets over in two games.
The ladies got off to a strong start quickly taking the first two sets before some complacency invited the first threat of the evening. The visitors seemed to have saved their strongest pairings for the second round which caught Jo and Bridget off guard. As Jo admitted, they expected the second pairings to be weaker than the first, who’d they’d beaten fairly easily, so ‘expected to win’, which saw them drop the only game of the evening. On the other court, things had briefly threatened to boil over when a minor mix up over the score prompted a few raised voices from the visiting players but with things calmed, normal service was resumed and Academy went on to wrap up the match pretty comfortably.
The men on the other hand had a much tougher time of things and weren’t helped by a slightly hobbled Paul and an under the weather Al. The majority of the games were pretty tight and a couple of the sets required a decider so on another night might have seen a different scoreline. However, it was not to be and while the boys are clearly disappointed not to have at least shared the points, 4-2 was a fair result. They will be hoping to turn the tables when DL Reds visit the park in a months time.
