During April I played just two tournaments. The first one was the European Championships in Herning, Denmark. The other one followed two weeks later and it was the Velo Dutch International Challenge.

EC – unfortunately I was not chosen in the team for the team event and so I participated only in the individuals. I could play mixed doubles with Martina Benesova and also men´s double with Tomas Kopriva (substituted my usual partner Stanislav Kohoutek).

The mixed doubles match wasn´t a very good performance. We were up to French pair Stoyanov/Eymard and they didn´t give us many chances. They were just faster, more accurate and more confident and we were beaten in 2 sets in 21 minutes and left the court with not good feelings. (Martina´s ankle injury before the tournament and lack of practise together could also be some reasons why we performed this way).

On the other hand the men´s doubles match of me and Tomas against the Dutch pair Koen Ridder/Ruud Bosch was something totally different. We had one more day with Tomas to prepare for the play and we spent a lot of time in the hall practising doubles stuff. Drives, atak and defence and especially serving and recieving of the shuttle and around the net play. And it payed off. We fought with the Dutch for more than half an hour and the match was equal. We lost 14:21 in the 1st game. After the interval we didn´t focus on a couple of rallies, lifted the shuttle too early couple of times and the opponents got ahead of us. In the 2nd set we tried to prepare for their attack and we were trying to cover the net and keep the shuttle down. This led us until the score being 20:20. Than we played one 5cm out (the Dutch guys were just watching the shuttle hoping it would fly off the court) and than lost another rally – so the end score was 20:22.

This match has been my third at the EC (after one match in 2006 and the mixed here) and eventually it was an equal fight from which I could take something for myself that could help me.

After losing we could watch the top Europeans in action and a lot of superb perfomances could be seen.

Velo Dutch – some two weeks after the EC we set out with my coach Radek to Wateringen (suburb of den Haag) where the event took place. I was to play against Estonian no. 1 Raul Must (he has by the way beaten our no. 1. Petr Koukal 3 times this year). I knew that the match was not going to be easy and I had to prepare for a technical runner and a very good defensive player. From the beginning I was trying to create good chances for attack and make points from them. In the first part of the opening game it was working, but as the match was getting longer it was still more and more difficult to win the points by attack. Raul was keeping the play in long rallies and I was forced to slow down a bit which was my end in both of the games. I lost 15:21 and 16:21. I think the match wasn´t bad at all but I just didn´t have enough strength to beat him. So this game showed what I should work on until playing the next tournaments in May in Slovenia, Spain and France.

Results of the individual European Championships

Oficiální stránka šampionátu

Výsledky Velo Dutch International Challenge

Pavel Florian

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