Congratulations to Karolina Pliskova and Petra Kvitova for their Jan. 2019 title wins!

In my previous post, I ended last season celebrating the Czech Fed Cup win over USA in the final. I start 2019 by celebrating two big title wins for two top Czech women players: Karolina Pliskova won Brisbane and Kvitova won Sydney International! Congratulations to both! May they collect many more titles this year!
The sad news for Czech tennis is the retirement, due to ill health (from viruses/reactive arthritis), of Lucie Safarova, a hugely talented all-court player who was great to watch. I’ll miss her!

Another loss for the game is Agnieszka Radwanska who has also retired due to a foot injury that, like Andy Murray’s hip, doctors are unable to repair, especially for the strains of competitive tennis. I’ll miss her creative shots! Her good friend, Caroline Wozniacki, is dealing with rheumatoid arthritis but is excited to be defending her Australian Open title.

The Australian Open main draw starts now, in an hours’ time or so.

So, on a fun note before they start, here’s a photo of me aged 7 ½ on a make-shift grass court complete with a washing line as a net! The balls are coming at me quite hard because on the other side of the washing line is a tall, early 30’s male! (Nothing unusual for me, since childhood I regularly hit with an adult, male or female and sometimes two of them on the other side of the net while I'm the only player on my side of the court!) It’s a practice session focusing on volleying, drive volleys and generally taking every ball out of the air because the grass is not to specification for a grass court so if the ball is left to bounce it’ll die!

More of these photos available on my Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/BseIZNihbvV/ 

Many years later I was back to Frinton to play an ITF grass court tournament. Unfortunately, it was that time of year when flying insects cover you from head to toe. So there I was, covered with these insects playing my match!