Britons are playing padel all wrong

Anyone hankering after a mini-break in Spain could have simulated the effect last week for a fraction of the price. All that was needed was a trip to Kensington Olympia: venue for the first professional padel event to be staged in this country.

The players had names such as Beatriz González Fernández or Luis Hernández Quesada. The merchandising stands included brands such as Joma, which makes Villarreal’s football apparel. And the shots themselves are called things like bandeja (tray), vibora (viper) or gancho (hook).

Despite its origins in Mexico in 1969, padel is now dominated by Spain to the same extent that cricket is by India, or table tennis by China. Admittedly, it has crossed over to the UK like an invasive species, with court numbers climbing from about 100 at the start of 2021 to not far off 2,000 now. But are we really achieving fluency in this foreign sporting language? Last week’s results were less than encouraging.

No British players earned entry to this inaugural Premier Padel event in London via their rankings. Of the six who were granted wild card invitations, the only one to win a match was Christian Medina Murphy – a man who, as his name suggests, has Spanish heritage. The world No 173, Medina Murphy, was born to an English mother but grew up in Cádiz and now lives in Alicante.

And what of recreational padel? Even after five years of exponential growth, the UK boasts perhaps a million regular players, as opposed to about six million in Spain. It is a significant gap, and one that extends to quality as well as quantity. That, at least, is the experience of Tom and Sandy Farquharson – a pair of British internationals who founded “The Padel School” as an instructional website.

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“In their understanding of the game, and their tactical sophistication, the Spanish are years ahead of us,” said Sandy Farquharson, a 42-year-old who played a few Futures events in tennis in the late Noughties. “It can be quite a humbling experience. When I started, I was a 28-year-old ex-professional tennis player who came to padel full of energy and enthusiasm. And then I went to Spain. I remember being thrashed by a couple of 50-year-olds who were finishing their cigarettes as they walked on to the court.

“As things stand now, the British game has lots of players whose level stands between beginner and low intermediate,” Farquharson added.

“The best thing about padel is that it’s easy to start playing and enjoy yourself straight away. But the flip side is that matches are so fun you just carry on playing them. You don’t actually train or learn. You don’t have any coaching, which is seen as a basic requirement for anyone who takes up tennis. Most of the players that come to our clinics have probably played for a year or two and not had a single lesson.”

The arrival of Premier Padel – a much bigger deal than the second-tier FIP events previously staged in London and Bristol, with a prize pot of £410,000 – could thus be a watershed moment for the sport in Britain: a chance to see where we are going wrong.

Several of the more aspirational players at my local club – Holmer Green in Buckinghamshire – have numbered among the 20,000-odd spectators who attended six days of competition. They came away with food for thought after watching the probing, patient rallies which make up the bulk of the professional game. (The average number of shots in a padel point stands at about 10 for the men and 12 for the women – a figure which matches that of squash but creates a very different rhythm to singles tennis’s fleeting four).

Plenty of tennis fans cannot see the attraction. They consider padel to be a dumbed-down version of their favourite game, suitable only for those klutzes who cannot master a topspin forehand. “At professional level, the points just go on and on,” said one sniffy friend. “It’s definitely not a spectator sport.”

But for padel wannabes who have struggled with a difficult shot such as the vibora – a roundhouse smash in which the aim is to instil underspin as well as pace – there is real satisfaction in watching professionals demonstrate the technique with such nonchalance, often several times in a single rally.

High-level padel has a chess-like quality. A series of soft dinks and lobs are deployed in the hope of manoeuvring your opponents into an awkward position and thus earning a juicy short ball that you can smash away for a winner. There are two common ways of hitting these winners: either the ball flies out of the glass box entirely – at which point your opponents might run outside the court and attempt a spectacular retrieval – or it climbs so high after rebounding from the back wall that it returns to your own side of the court without being intercepted.

You had better make sure that your put-away is precise though. Should that smash lack even the slightest bit of juice, it will loop back gently towards the net like the proverbial low-hanging fruit, allowing the opposition to turn the tables with a killing shot of their own. Calculations of risk and reward soon become so ticklish that they might require a mathematical PhD.

“Most racket sports are about power,” said 34-year-old Tom Farquharson, who – in a previous existence – won the boys’ doubles at Wimbledon in 2010. “It’s useful in padel, of course, but only on certain shots because the ball usually just comes back off the glass. So the real art of the game is about slowing rallies down with lobs and chiquitas [“little ones”], which are gentle shots that dip down towards the volleyer’s toes.”

“Hopefully, recreational players who come to this will think, ‘Wow, look at this level’,” chimed Tom’s older brother, Sandy. “And then they might want to improve themselves, as opposed to just playing social games.

“One great thing about Premier Padel is that this is the equivalent of an ATP or a WTA event in tennis, but you get much better access to the players. You’re on the back of the practice court so you see them warming up. You’re close in on the centre court [which holds 4,000 spectators] so you can hear how much communication goes on during the points. This whole event is such a huge thing for players, for coaches, even for club owners, just to understand how the game works and what ‘good’ looks like.”

So what do the fans think? According to Matt Slipper – one of those padel enthusiasts from the aforementioned Holmer Green club – there was an appealing buzziness to the tournament’s whole vibe.

“The practice courts are right by the entrance,” Slipper said, “so you see padel the second you step inside. There’s plenty of stuff for kids, there are mini courts to mess around on, and the players aren’t quite as prima donna-ish as they are in tennis. They’re walking around the venue, so you can bump into them, get them to sign your giant tennis ball, or take a selfie.”

Another player from the same club posted a picture of himself alongside Arturo Coello, half of the No 1-ranked pair, on our WhatsApp group with the caption “Partner secured for September club championships.”

As for the matchplay, Slipper’s takeaway had less to do with the patience of the rallies than the venomous power applied on decisive shots – especially by noted point-killers such as Coello or top-ranked woman, Gemma Triay.

“After watching these guys, I feel like I need to be a bit more aggressive and confident that my shots will come off,” said Slipper. “At my level, we sometimes play the safe shot back, the easy return that keeps the point going, but I’m going to try to trust myself and go for it a bit more, make it harder for the opposition. The whole day was a really fun and interesting experience. I’ll definitely be coming back next year.”