Sayers takes IRTPA Satellite title with ice-cold determination
Trueman shows spirited fight but faded late
Bryn Sayers won the IRTPA Satellite over Max Trueman at the Aiken Tennis Club on Tuesday, in a final where he grew stronger and stronger as the match went on, despite a spirited challenge from his younger opponent.
There was a vast gulf in experience going into the match. On one side of the net was Bryn Sayers, a two-time Open champion who has competed in four World Championship Eliminator series. On the other, Max Trueman, whose top accomplishment was winning the 2022 World Junior Championship, and who hadn’t been born the first time his opponent competed in the IRTPA Championships.
Despite the experience gap, Trueman had the better start to the match as Sayers — as he had done in the semi-final — took some time to fully warm up into the match. Both players were relatively content to play the traditional floor game, trying to catch their opponent out with a difficult ball into the corner. Trueman took the first three games, but once Sayers was fully firing, the bullets that he was sending down shot after shot put Trueman on the back foot. Sayers brought it back to 3-all. Trueman had to knuckle down on his defensive game, returning ball after ball and making very few mistakes. Despite Sayers’s constant press, Trueman held firm as the pair exchanged the next four games, sending the set into a decider. Trueman managed to find a trio of tight balls against the side walls eliciting tough racket errors from Sayers, before sealing the set with a rare main wall dedans.
Sayers’s demeanour hardly changed going into the second set. Trueman approached the set with a little more aggression, looking to hit through Sayers a bit more and find winners, not just errors. But Sayers responded by lifting his own game, showing off the variety in his stroke play as he proved to have an answer and more for every shot from Trueman. As such, Trueman’s previously solid defence wavered, allowing Sayers to run away with the set, winning five games in a row.
Trueman stuck with his main serving strategy of giraffes and chandelles going into the third set, despite some growing visible frustration. He began berating himself after each unlucky bounce or error, while Sayers remained as stone-faced as ever. There was little Trueman could do to break through Sayers as everything seemed to come out of the middle of his strings. Sayers reached 4/0 having lost just three points, at which point the Hail Mary shots started to come from Trueman. Though Trueman took it to deuce in the fifth game, Sayers won the sixth to love, breaking out a slight smile for the first time in the match as he acknowledged the crowd.
Sayers becomes the best-handicapped player to win the IRTPA Satellite at +5.2, beating the +2.4 held by Danny Jones when he beat Rod McNaughtan at Middlesex in 2007. It also marked his first tournament victory since the 2023 Jesmond Dene Cup. “Last time this was played in 2019, I made the final of the main draw, so to make the final of the Satellite was pretty cool given everything that has happened with the surgery and the recovery,” said Sayers, “It’s my first time playing here, visiting here and it definitely feels like the court is a part of the community.”
The main draw of the IRTPA Players’ Championship begins on Wednesday, with the first round matches carrying on until Thursday.
Match results:
4:00 PM: Bryn Sayers (1) def Max Trueman 5/6 6/1 6/0
Order of play for Wednesday (all times EST):
12:00 PM: Camden Riviere (1) vs Josh Smith
1:30 PM: Robert Shenkman (8) vs Tony Hollins
5:00 PM: Nick Howell (3) vs Max Trueman
7:00 PM: Josh Dodgson vs Ben Taylor-Matthews (4)