Hello New Zealand!!

We have some good news for you all - New Zealand has taken out Mexico (11th seeds vs 6th seeds) on the glass court at Condado Shopping Centre - in an huge 2 -1 battle.

Unfortunately again there's no photos - we have a good reason for this but in due time we will try get them up!!! You'll have to bare with me and my writing, hopefully I don't bore you too much!

Paul kicked us off to a pearler against 7th seed (from the individual draw) Miled Zarazou, who was Mexico's number 1 - and after being 1 - 0 and then 2 - 1 down, managed to fight back to win an epic 5 setter, there were some nervous moments for the team watching but Paul played amazingly well and it was a well timed, well deserved win!

I was up next against Mario Yanez - and got off to a good start winning the first game - unfortunately I made a few errors and he started dominating across the middle of the court and I struggled and couldn't fight my way back into it, a bit disappointing for me when I saw the other boys games but I did give it my best - unfortunately putting all the pressure back on our number two Lancey...

Lance played Ricardo Lopez - a fit, gutsy player with some really good shots from everywhere on the court - Lance went down 2 - 0 pretty quickly and we were starting to get a bit scared, but a good rark up from Anthony between games saw Lance go back on and command a comeback to take that set and bring some real positivity to his game. He went back on and took out the 4th game, the most memorable moment for us was at 9 - 8 up to him, he had a gigantic rally (must of been like 3 minutes!) and they were both stumbling around the court, the other guy flicked the ball off the back and we were thinking "quick, drop drop drop!" and we see him line up a cross court nick (what are you thinking Lance!?!?!?!?!?!) and then perfectly execute it to go up game ball and make it a 5th set. I'm sure you can all picture Lance doing it! He battled out one of the toughest fifth sets I've seen - playing in a completely tired state and doing everything he could - at 5 all we were wishing it could be over (pretty stressful watching, we should probably be apologising to our families for all the games over the years about here!) and then Lance managed to get up 9 - 5 after a few solid rallies. Bryce, Paul, Anthony and I along with some of our Indian friends were all on the edge of our seats, clapping and I'm sure there was even some full roars of "COMMMMME ON!!!!!!". The last few rallies were huge and intense and the biggest rally of the match saw Lance win 11 - 8 in the 5th to give us a 2 - 1 win over Mexico.


(1) Paul Coll vs Miled Zarazou
Win
(3) Michael Sunderland vs Mario Yanez
Lose
(2) Lance Beddoes vs Ricardo Lopez
Win

(I'll add scores when they are up on website...)

That's all I'm gonna say about that but it was a good fight, and tomorrow we have our best opportunity at making the top 8 - thats QUARTER FINALS of the World Junior Teams Event! We have been drawn to play Venezuela who made it through their pool over South Africa after a shock forfeit due to a mix up with the South African team.

Tomorrow we are going to go out there and give it our best shot, and hopefully we can be writing to the blog tomorrow night with more good news, we will give it absolutely everything we've got!


Cheers guys!!