The Racket Roulette

The Lidl option, the classic Spanish label, the limited edition, or the one on sale. I could be talking about wine. I am talking about padel rackets. And when I choose either, I bring roughly the same amount of real knowledge to the decision, which is to say not very much, dressed up in vocabulary I have absorbed from people who know more than I do.

This is the honest position of the intermediate player. We use the words. Control, power, balance, sweet spot, carbon, the format of the frame. We say them with a straight face across the net to each other, having picked them up from better players, from reviews, from a coach who waved his own sponsored racket somewhere around the middle of a lesson. Nobody ever fitted us for anything. Nobody asked about our game before we bought the thing we play it with. We chose the way you choose wine in a restaurant when you don't want to look cheap or extravagant: something in the middle, or on offer, or whatever the friend who seems to know is holding.

I found this out properly because I left my racket in Scotland.

I had been playing at Racket Barn in Govan, a good indoor place off Robert Street, and I drove home to Bristol without it. Turned up to a Sunday social one of the locals had organised and discovered that my racket was still four hundred miles north. David Lynch, the general manager at Racket Barn, is posting it back down. It is a place worth a piece of its own, and it will get one in the next issue. In the meantime I was without a racket in my own city, which turned out to be more useful than it sounds. A man who has to borrow, or hire, or try, is a man briefly forced to pay attention.

The wall

Padel4All at Lockleaze is my home club. I paid for the court like anyone else, and I mention this only so you know there is no arrangement behind any of what follows. What Lockleaze has, alongside four covered courts, is a retail wall and a small, sane offer: five pounds gets you time with the rackets on it, and if you buy one within the trial, the five pounds comes off the price. Bullpadel, Adidas, Babolat, Hirostar. No agenda. No sponsorship. A man without his own racket, and a chance to find out whether he could tell one from another.

The first was an Adidas Metalbone Carbon CTRL. Round head, the control model in the line, and heavier in the hand than the stated weight had led me to expect. I played two matches with it back to back because the courts were double-booked and nobody minded. The sweet spot was large and genuinely forgiving, the kind of racket that makes you feel a fraction better than you are. I enjoyed it. What I could not honestly tell you, walking off, was whether it suited my game or whether I had simply enjoyed playing with something that felt expensive.

Ant, who was working the wall that day, talked me out of a Bullpadel Neuron for the second session. Too close to the Adidas, he said, you won't learn anything. He steered me to a Vertex 05 Hybrid instead, a teardrop frame with a curvature profile you can actually see moulded into the edge, marked up as a test unit. It is worth pausing on what Ant did there. He asked, in effect, what I already had in my hand and what would tell me something different. That is a form of fitting, even though nobody in the shop would have called it that, and it was the most useful thing anyone did for me all week.

The Vertex felt heavier than the Adidas and carried more power, and the grip was the Hexachrome, the same one that sits on my own racket at home. I recognised it before I had hit a ball, and that recognition was the most honest piece of data I gathered all day. Because here is the thing I have to report: across two sessions, I genuinely could not tell you much difference between the two rackets. Not in any way I could have defended blind. I could feel the grip I knew. Everything else was a fog of adjectives I had been handed by other people.

The New Zealand line

I have spent a lot of time in New Zealand wineries. I have drunk a great deal of good wine, and I can tell a good one from a bad one without much trouble. Ask me to separate a Bordeaux from a Ribera del Duero with my eyes shut and I would be guessing inside two sips. This does not make me a bad person. It makes me an ordinary drinker with a working palate and no formal training, which is exactly the padel player I am. I am starting to think the two problems are the same problem.

Then there was the sound.

The third racket on the wall was a Hirostar Andromeda. I chose it, if I am honest, because I liked the look of it, which by my own argument is the wrong reason and precisely the reason most people choose. I got two competitive sets out of it, a 7-5 and a tiebreak that went to 12-10, the best padel I played all week. Light, controlled, no fatigue across two sets, and a thing I had not experienced so clearly before: when you catch the middle of the face properly, the racket tells you by the sound it makes. Not in a review. Not on the spec sheet. Only in the playing. The Andromeda told me when I was getting it right, and that feedback is worth more than any number printed on the throat of the frame.

There is a detail about the Andromeda I want to handle carefully, because it is the quiet irony of the whole exercise. It is a light frame, balanced toward feel and control rather than raw power, and Hirostar are one of those makers who would rather not aim a racket at one gender: the Andromeda is built for all players, women and men alike. Of every racket I picked up that week, on both sides of the court, defending on the right and attacking on the left, it was the one that suited me best. I do not think this is a gimmick and I do not think it is about gender. I think it is about a design philosophy that stops asking the player to be physically stronger than they are, and it turns out that describes me rather well. Hold that thought. It comes back.

The one I already own

Away from the wall, I have a racket I chose on my own account: a Raquex Excel. I met the Raquex people at the first UK Padel Convention, a British brand priced with some deliberation below the Spanish and German names, and I bought the Excel with my own money and no arrangement of any kind. It is a teardrop control frame, twelve-kay carbon, on the heavier side. I like it a great deal, and I have a genuine problem with it.

Disclosure  The Raquex Excel is the author's own, bought at full price. Raquex is also the brand tied to ASC's referral giveaway. ASC has no commercial affiliation with Raquex and received no payment or gifted product for this piece.

On the right, where I play my defensive, controlled game, the Excel is a fine thing. The sweet spot sits where I want it, it defends better than most of what I have tried, and it still has enough left to finish a point when the point is there to be finished. On the left, at my level or below, when I want to go after the ball, I reach for something else. On the left against better players, when I am pushed back into defending again, the Excel comes good once more. It is my right-side weapon and my punching-up-a-level racket, and it is not a five-times-a-week racket, because five times a week it leaves my elbow complaining.

That is the part I cannot resolve honestly. My elbow aches after playing with it, and I do not know whether the fault lies in the frame, in its weight and balance, or in me, my technique, my age, the simple arithmetic of how much I play. Is it the racket or is it the man holding it? I have no way to answer that from inside my own arm, and it is the reason a racket I admire is not a racket I can commit to. The friction is the honest bit. A review that loves everything is a brochure.

The morning with Pablo

So I did the thing the intermediate almost never does. I asked an expert.

Pablo Moreno spent about ninety minutes with me at Lockleaze, on a court I paid for, in his capacity as an ambassador for Bas3line. He knew I was writing this and was happy to be part of it. The first twenty minutes were not padel at all. They were education: what the carbon grade actually changes, where the sweet spot physically sits on each frame and why, what the weight does in the hand before it does anything to the ball. He put the rackets in my hand and showed me the differences I had been failing to feel on my own. This, it turned out, was the missing instrument. Not a better racket. A better way of looking at the rackets I already had access to.

Bas3line is worth a paragraph on its own terms. It is a British brand, designed in the UK and founded in 2022 by Wesley Teixeira, a sports-injury physiotherapist who works out of The Queen's Club in London and who started the company after watching a rise in padel-related arm, shoulder and wrist injuries walk through his clinic. Its signature is a patent-pending construction called Hollowbridge, which takes weight out of the bridge of the racket to cut the impact stress without giving up power or control. It is a brand that began with an injury problem rather than a marketing one, and once you know that, the rackets make a particular kind of sense. (A small correction for the record, since I got this wrong myself before I checked: Teixeira is the founder. Richard Henman, sometimes assumed to be the man behind it, is an investor and the brand's head of communications, not its originator.)

We hit across the range. The most controlled, entry-level frame felt lovely and let me down when I needed to put a ball away from the left: too forgiving, not enough punch. The attacking end, where the sweet spot sits higher up the face, punished me consistently; the flat smashes came off harder, but the margin for error was cruel, and I know exactly how many balls I pop off the top of the frame at the net in a real match. The one I kept coming back to sat in the middle. A balanced frame, medium sweet spot placed centrally, responsive without being brutal, the right blend of control and the ability to finish. Pablo plays a neighbouring model himself. Given how the morning went, that felt less like a coincidence and more like the point.

Somewhere in the middle of it I said the truest thing I have said about my own game in a while, and I will let it stand as I said it. I'm not that good a player. So I need a racket that is going to be a little bit more forgiving. I need the racket to let me off a little bit and still have that power to finish. An expert did not have to tell me that. But it took an expert putting the right frames in my hand for me to say it out loud.

I did raise one honest criticism of the session, to Pablo directly, and he took it as intended. The teaching and the demonstration were excellent. What was missing was match time: thirty minutes of real points with the frame, in the environment where it either works or it doesn't, because a racket that behaves in a feeding drill is not the same as a racket that behaves at 4-4. The fix is obvious. A two-hour session, twenty minutes of brand education, a coaching introduction, then a proper half-hour trial in a match. Not a complaint about the man or the brand. The next version of a good idea.

What the roulette was actually measuring

Lay the week out and a pattern shows through it that I did not go looking for. The Raquex I love but cannot play often, because of my elbow. The Bas3line built by a physiotherapist to take load off the arm. The Hirostar, lighter and designed around feel, the one that quietly outperformed everything on both sides. Three separate rackets, one message, arriving from three directions: I play better, and I hurt less, with equipment that does not demand physical dominance to work. My colleague Ana is writing, in this same issue's neighbourhood, about how much padel is too much padel, and the load a body carries when it plays every day. The racket sits at the exact point where that question meets the court. It is the thing you hold while you do the damage, or don't.

Which brings me to the part of this the industry has not solved, and I want to be fair about it, because the lazy version of this argument is wrong. It is not true that Britain has no way to try a racket before you buy it. PDH Sports in Derby has a bookable demo court. Pádel Nuestro runs a take-home test service where you play real matches with a frame before you commit. My own club advertises a custom fitting centre. The exceptions exist. What they are not, yet, is a culture. They are scattered, retailer-led, often mail-order, and rarely sitting where you actually play. In Spain you can walk in, take a racket home from any number of shops, and hit with it for a week. Golf built this decades ago and gave it a name: nobody serious buys clubs without being fitted, and the fitting asks about your swing before it sells you anything. Padel has the frames, the money and the players. It has not yet built the habit of asking a buyer a single question about his game.

There is one test I have not run, and I am saving it. I want to lay all of these rackets in front of a coach who knows how I actually play, and ask him, cold, which one he would put in my bag. Then I want to compare his answer to the one I arrived at by feel. If they match, that is interesting. If they don't, that is more interesting, because it would mean self-knowledge is not enough, and that the thing I have been missing all along is not a better racket but a better second opinion.

I still do not have a clean winner, and I have decided that is the honest finding rather than a failure to reach one. The Raquex is the racket I own and cannot fully trust. The Bas3line is the one a proper process led me to. The Hirostar is the one that surprised me by being right. Any of them could be the answer. What I know now that I did not know a week ago is how little most of us know when we hand over the money, and how few people in this sport are set up to help.

The labels are confusing. The bottle is usually the deciding factor. And most of us are still buying the one that looks nice and hoping it goes with the meal.

Disclosure. The Raquex Excel featured in this piece is personally owned by the author, bought at full price. The rackets trialled on the Padel4All wall were hired for the standard fee; nothing was gifted or kept. The Bas3line fitting session was led by Pablo Moreno in his capacity as a Bas3line ambassador; Alborán Social Club has no commercial affiliation with Raquex, Bas3line or Hirostar, and received no payment, sponsorship or gifted product in connection with this article. Court time and session fees were paid independently by ASC. Padel4All Lockleaze is the author's home club.