An Idiot Abroad- Asia

Its been a while since my last blog but here is the first of hopefully many! This years season has started well I have hit a good run of form and my ranking is now up to 117 in the world compared to 232 this time last year, and I have travelled to Japan, Malaysia and the Czech Republic for events.

After my summers training this year I decided to go away for a couple of events at a time as I found this worked well last season and it also helps spread the costs. So at the start of October I left for Japan which is probable one of the best places I have ever visited and somewhere I would love to go back to. The squash went well out there to I got through my first round and lost to Leo Au ranked around 60 in the world 3/1, I was happy with how I played and it gave me a real believe I could compete with those players well inside the top 100.

But no rest for the wicked though the next day I was up early to catch a flight to Malaysia which I have been to a few times before. This event was slightly different for me as I had to qualify and I was in for a shock as the courts we played on had no air conditioning whatsoever which meant slogging it out at around 30 degrees! For some reason though it seemed to help me as I beat a player of  similar ranking to myself in qualifying finals (Bart Ravelli) 3/0 and then bit a local player Elvin Keo who was ranked 100 in the world 3/1. Now as he was a local guy you can imagine I wasn't the most popular player there. However the Malaysians had the last laugh as I lost to another Malaysian player Kamran Khan (An ex-Wycliffe pupil) 3/0 the next day in just over an hour.

A good trip overall and now its about putting in a good block of training over the Christmas period before my next event which will be toward the end of January.

If you wnat to follow the results more closely you can find most of the events on
www.squashsite.co.uk/ the BBC Sport of Squash