It was not easy and Loughborough 1st showed they are an outfit to be reckoned with as we were beaten 13-4 in a hard home game.
Loughborough 1sts came a full 2 hours early, and warmed up in leisurely fashion. Most of the Oxford team arrived just as the games were meant to start, much to the worry of our Captain, Seonsam Na (oops!).
However, the lack of warm up could not prevent our president and former captain Paul Erdunast, the final year classicist at Worcester, from driving two of our opponents to devastation with his tricky serve and attack game.
Adam Stanway (not Stanley as was depicted in the ladder on the wall!) at Merton scored two great wins despite the fact that the physics fresher had to work on his tutorial sheets between the matches for his tutorials scheduled later that day. His forceful backhands and hard hitting in general made this an excellent debut against one of the top teams in the division.
Seonsam Na and Maciej Jarocki fought hard but were unlucky to go down in each of their games against what was in all fairness a very strong all-round team.
The real suspense came in the doubles where these two triumphant Oxford players staged a heroic battle against their opponents when they came back from 9-4 down in the first match before they won the set, and again when they came back from 9-5 down all the way to 10-9 before Paul’s ‘shot of a lifetime’ unfortunately went wide of the opponent’s table.
Next week we travel to Birmingham to play their 1st team, and we are hoping for a strong team performance!