Leicestershire Women’s Inter-County Championships 2014;
Premier Finals, Wimbledon, Surrey
 
Leicestershire Women’s first team (Lilly Taylor, Rachel Calver, Laura Campbell, Tracey Sykes and Debbie Bowen) headed off to Wimbledon on Saturday 3^rd May without some of usual suspects in the team but, none the less optimistic we could pull off a win. With our new team shirts (thank you to Robin Clements for sorting the smartest team shirts of the weekend at short notice), and great team spirit we were ready. Our first opponents were Cheshire, we hoped they hadn’t travelled well and knew they were missing a couple of players too but unfortunately they were equally as ready and far too strong. Our stand out performance was Lily Taylor v’s Emily Whitlock. Lily was in control from the start and after some long and punishing rallies she took the first game. Lilly’s pressure continued and she appeared to be up in all of the games pressurizing Emily with well executed shots leaving her to retrieve, which she did and needing to rely upon her well known fitness. Lilly narrowly lost a couple of key points which gave Emily an opportunity to take the lead and the next three games. It was such a good game and evenly fought that no one could understand how the result turned out the way it did. The rest of the team struggled with Cheshire’s strength in depth and we lost the match 5-0, they definitely do not travel badly!
 
This put the pressure on for our afternoon match against Kent, if we lost this next match we would be relegated to division 1. By now we were more settled and got off to a fantastic start with both Debbie Bowen and Tracey Sykes winning to give us a 2-0 lead. Debbie took her match to the fifth game before showing determination to take the win. Tracey was in great form all weekend and won comfortably 3-0 at number 4. Unfortunately the next two matches were less straight forward, both Laura and Rachel did not play close to their best and lost 3-0 this tied the match at 2-2. Lilly squared up to her friend and long time opponent Georgina Kennedy at number one. Both were equally determined to win and both played fantastic squash. Unfortunately the mornings game had taken its toll on Lilly and despite her fight, Georgina had not had such a tough match in the morning enabling her to physically hang in and apply the pressure. Lilly lost in four games and we lost the match 3-2.
 
Our final match on the Sunday morning was against Warwickshire who were the other team relegated from the weekend. Despite Warwickshire’s strength we still had a chance of winning. Debbie was first on court at number five but couldn’t maintain her winning form, losing 3-0. Tracey was next on and had another fantastic match with most of her games going to two clear points. Despite playing well in all of her matches and having an epic match on Sunday morning Tracey lost 3-1. Leicestershire won their next two matches with Lilly back to her best, winning 3-1 against Leonie Holt. Rachel took a 3-1 win over her opponent leaving the match tied at 2-2. Laura was last on court and it looked like it would go to the fifth game when tied at 1-1 but unfortunately Warwickshire took the match 3-2.
Despite not getting the results we wanted we narrowly missed out on playing a third year in the Premier division. We will definitely be looking to return at the end of 2014/15 season as winners of Division one.