After a long journey from Chennai, India, we arrived early into Melbourne for our first Grand Slam of 2010. We were very excited and couldn’t wait to get started. Our ranking meant that this was our first grand slam on merit and we felt like we had improved our level since Wimbledon and we felt like we belonged with the big boys.

The first few days were all practice, practice, practice. Everyone wants to be ready to go on the first Monday. We were playing well and our opener saw us play against Tipsarevic and Lu. We had good support from Hayley and her dad. Colin had school friends watching as well as good support from British tennis. We really played solid and did the basics well. We knew they were going to play an attacking game from the back of the court. We executed well and came out on top in a tightly fought match 7-5 7-5. It was our first grand slam win and we enjoyed the feeling.

We found ourselves on court two on the middle saturday for our second round match. We played against Kohlmann and Neiminen. It was another tight match which saw us get off to a great start. We were on serve in the second set until I lost serve to level up the match at one set all. The Grand Slam events have singles scoring, which made it a tie break set rather than the usual match tiebreak. We lost serve early in the 3rd and never managed to break back even though we had a number of chances. We left the court very disappointed but felt we had learnt a lot from the experience and look forward to more matches at the Grand Slam level.

We were able to enjoy Melbourne and the restaurants were fantastic. We did manage to eat at our favourite restaurant, Wagamana’s, a couple of times. Melbourne Zoo was fantastic and we enjoyed the Aquarium, even though it was slightly overpriced. Having Hayley and her dad, Ralph, there made the week extra special and we look to make the Australia swing an annual event now.