Court Maintenance

We spent the morning trying to find Chinatown and, after successfully doing so, with the help of one of my moppers acting as an interpreter to order my food, I ate dinner (I mean the meal at midday), before heading to the NIA. Our 3-hours-early-punctuality was apparently just a little too keen, and we spent the remnants of the morning making the most of the Wi-Fi in the ICC...

After seemingly instinctively analysing various mopping techniques yesterday, it was then time to whack out the mopping face and get my mop on.  Yesterday, I had noticed that a lot of the moppers had seemed to be hunched over, which I wouldn’t exactly class as an ideal technique, but, upon getting on to court, I realised that this was a technique pretty much unavoidable: the mop was about as tall as the distance between my foot and my knee! This was until one of the line judges next to me felt my mopping pain, took the mop off me and taught me the singularly most important lesson of my life: how to extend a mop. His extension of the mop was, in fact, slightly too enthusiastic and I was left with a mop about the height of me, but I mopped through the technical problems and spent the rest of the session extending every mop that I could get to.

I mopped for:
Xiaolong LIU & Zihan QUI vs. Mohd FAIRUZIZUAN & Mohd ZAKRY
Saina NEHWAL vs. Shixian WANG
Tontowi AHMAD & Lilyana NATSIR vs. Robert MATEUSIAK & Nadiezda ZIEBA
Markis  KIDO & Pia ZEBADIAH vs. Sudket PRAPAKAMOL & Saralee THOUNGTHONGKAM

All of the matches that I was on for seemed to be 3-set-marathons, and, as I hadn’t needed to do the sit-up-straight-in-the-mopping-chair since summer, I was clearly out of practice and within about half an hour my back was not loving life, and I was relishing the opportunity to be able to get up and mop because I could click my back on my way back to the mopping-chair! (Potentially too much information, I know).

The first match that I was on for was a very close 3-setter and the Chinese girl was very sweaty, which obviously made my life pretty exciting. She was also fairly shouty and, at one point, stared right through me and shouted in a way in which I can only describe as a bark. Although I have no doubt that she wasn’t actually looking at me, she unfortunately was staring right through my eyes, so I ish made eye contact with her before she did it. Hopefully the millions of viewers in China didn’t catch me visibly jumping up in my chair with shock...

The last match that I mopped for was probably the longest and, after the Thai pair (with very exciting long names, of course) thought that they had won in the 3^rd end, a fault was called and the Indonesian pair pulled back to win it. I was, as always, sat next to the coaches, one of whom seemed to take it upon himself to provide a running commentary on life in Thai, much to the amusement of the line judge next to me, who, I am assuming, vaguely understood at least some of what he was saying.

After today I am left with one lingering thought going into tomorrow: I am really not sure how I feel about the badminton-high-5. I preferred the good old days of the badminton-bum-tap.