When I got my second Murray prediction wrong in a row at Wimbledon I admit I slipped into a blogging sulk. Furious that my decent tipping service was more or less on the scrap heap and that I had showed little faith in a truly gifted player, I quickly lost interest in updating The Tennis Centre and got carried away in various activities during my summer break from university.
If you have read my about me section I planned to play a number of tournaments in the months of July and August and was going to write my results up. However in my quest to do well at these upcoming tournaments and find a bit of the magic I had in my younger county years I trained too hard and ended up with tendonitis and medial epicondylitis (golfers elbow). Something to do with my serving technique apparently. Whatever. All I knew was that one day I woke up after playing the night before with a horrific pain on the inside of my elbow.
This means I have hardly hit a ball since early July and despite a number of physio sessions my elbow hasn’t particularly improved that much. If anyone has any advice it would be greatly recieved!
So I decided to transform into a left hander, a logical decision to keep the feet moving whilst I wait for my right elbow to recover and I now and rate myself as tennis’ answer to football utility man Phil Neville.
He can play in any position on the pitch to suit his managers wishes and similarly I can play tennis left and right handed to suit my opponents wishes (and standard). Phillip can kick with his left and right foot and I can obviously play right handed as well as being able to hit a vicious left handed forehand, a technically sound single left handed backhand (occasionally) and admittedly I have a distinctly average left handed serve. But this is OK, football utility men are average and this is no different in the case of the first ever tennis utility man.
So I put myself up for a few tests and took on some casual tennis playing mates for money over the summer and usually comfortably defeated them with my Nadal like forehand. Hmmm maybe the forehand isn’t quite Nadal standard but it’s certainly better than Bogdanovic’.
