The Same Number Twice

Welcome to the third issue of The Alborán.

Twice this summer I drove across the city to Govan to play padel with people I had never met. Both games were booked the same way, through Padel Mates, as open matches. The first was Friday 3 July, the second Saturday 22 August, seven weeks later. Ninety minutes each. I went in at the same number both times, the 3.15 that Padel Mates has me at. The first game was open to players between 2.75 and 3.75, the second between 2.82 and 3.82. They were not the same game, and they were not close.

Elsewhere in this issue I have written about Racket Barn itself, the club where both were played, and about how an open match works: one player as the unit of booking, three strangers, a court, a time. That piece stops where the number is entered. This is what happened when I entered it twice.

The first of them is in that piece. What is not in it is how the game came to exist. None of the other three had played an open match before, which was not unusual in Glasgow at the time. David Lynch, the centre manager, had helped put it together. He found a few people and told them to look out for the game, so he created it almost a little bit, and that is a large part of why the level held. It was really nice, just talking with the people and playing.

The second went in at the same number, through the same app, at the same club. Nobody put that one together. During the warm-up I had the feeling that something was missing. You can tell, even from the way somebody is striking the ball, how they are hitting it and what they are looking to do. After the first set it was evident that this was not the correct level for me.

The games themselves were enjoyable, and my partner and I ended up winning relatively convincingly. The rallies were not there, though, and they were not consistent. Points ended in three or four shots. Many were won off the serve. Two of the four of us, my partner and one of our opponents, had a very similar serve, an underhand topspin serve of the sort you see in pickleball. Once you have adjusted to it you can step back, come off the glass and play it back. Until you have adjusted, it is difficult for a normal player.

Nobody behaved badly, as far as I could see, and I want that on the record before anything else. We did not do anything about it on court. We just played the match. Nobody had to say anything, because it was there in the body language, and there was nothing that could have been changed. A mismatched ninety minutes is not a grievance. It is ninety minutes that did not do what they were meant to do, bought at the same price as the ninety that did. Twenty minutes of it inside an Americano, or a free game, would have been perfectly fine. Ninety minutes of it is not. It is still fun to play padel, and there is still plenty you can do.

The number did not describe either evening. That is as far as I can take it, and I want to be exact about why. I know what I played, twice, and I know nothing else. I did not see how the other three arrived at their levels, I did not ask, and I would not want to reason outwards from two matches on a court in Govan to anything larger than two matches on a court in Govan.

What I have kept turning over since is the number itself, and how a person comes to his own. A player who reads himself generously and a player who reads himself modestly are both, as far as anyone can tell, being honest. On the night itself the distance between those two habits is the whole of your game.

The asymmetry is the thing I keep noticing. In my experience almost everyone feels they should be moving up, and it is rare to meet a player who has worked out that they are in the wrong game and asks to be put down. I had that conversation before a match at The Court on a Sunday afternoon, with a player who had asked to go down.

We all want to be better, and there is nothing wrong with wanting it. But if the levels do not mean the same thing from one club to the next, the wanting has nothing to push against, and what is left is a shared sense that beyond beginner everybody ought to be a 3 or better.

That 3.15 is Padel Mates only. On Playtomic I am 2.81. At Padel4All, my own club, which grades its players by committee, I am 3.25. On PadelLevels, which counts on a different scale altogether, I am 1,985, or 3.55 on PadelLevels' own conversion. Four numbers for one player, all held at the same time, and I could not tell you which of them is wrong.

Alex has taken this up properly in this issue, in the piece he has written alongside our conversation with Jethro Binns for the second episode of The Sessions. He knows the subject far better than I do and he has done the work on it. I have two evenings, seven weeks apart.

I do not know what the right answer is. At my own club the numbers are looked at by the coaches rather than picked by the player, and they still do not always make sense to me. I am going to go and find out what a 3 is worth in other parts of the country, and where it stops meaning the same thing.

As ever, if you have something to tell us, we would like to hear it: editors@alboransocialclub.com. Anyone who plays open matches will have their own version of both of those evenings, and I would read every one of them.