UEL lost to Imperial College 2nd team in a cup game on Wednesday at the Ethos sports centre. UEL entered the game as underdogs as they faced a side two divisions above them.
The match ended with a 4-4 draw but as it was a cup game the winner would be decided on number of points won during the eight matches.
With UEL again putting out Sean Wilson and Azhar Syed for the singles, they put out Alvin Lee and Tze Voon Lim as seed one for the doubles and Joshua Teoh and Irfan Lee as seed two.
Epic Battle
Wilson and Syed kicked off the game with two very close encounters and their toughest tests of the season so far.
Wilson came out on top of an epic battle with a 19-21, 21-16, 21-18 score line. This was followed up by a comfortable win from Syed, easing past his opponent 21-14, 21-13.
With UEL 2-0 up at this point it all depended on their doubles pairs to get the job done and contribute to progress through to the next round
‘Too Safe’
Unfortunately, Teoh and Lee were beaten 21-11, 21-15 with Lim and Lee losing out a three-set game 22-20 in the last game.
For the second week in a row Alvin Lee played with a different partner, to lose 22-20 in a deciding set. Lee admitted to “playing too safe when we reach 20-20 which allows the opponent to attack.“
With the scores at 2-2 once again UEL’s singles both won 2-0 in two tense matches, placing the scores at 4-2 to team UEL. But once again UEL were beaten heavily with a score line of 21-8, 21-11.
Edged Out
Knowing that Teoh and Lee needed to win one set due to the scoring system, they couldn’t pull it out of the bag losing 21-16, 21-10.
So UEL and Imperial were both on four points and the only way to separate them was to see how many points each team had won. Imperial edged out slightly with a total of 335 to UEL’s 315.
Bounce Back
That saw UEL knocked out of the cup at the round of 32 stage. All of UEL’s focus will be on winning the league and gaining promotion with only league matches to worry about for the future. UEL will hope to bounce back next week in the league against University of Medway at Sportsdock next week.
