She stated: “We’re quite a small rural club right in the middle of the country, and we’ve got some very keen players from all over the place.<\/p>\n
“It’s fantastic because it’s the eight top men in the world slugging it out, including the British number one John Lumley.”<\/p>\n
Jones added: “We’re all keeping fingers tightly crossed that we might have a British winner.”<\/p>\n
Also playing is the current world champion Camden Riviere, who is partnered with Tim Chisholm.<\/p>\n
The event will see two best-of-nine set, semi-final matches, each split over Wednesday and Thursday, followed by a nine-set final played over Saturday and Sunday.<\/p>\n
The venue will also hold a handicap doubles tournament called the Pragnell Championship Cup, alongside the main event.<\/p>\n
“The actual court looks a bit like a monastery, like a cloister,” said Jones.<\/p>\n
“It’s like an ordinary lawn tennis court, but with porches around three sides and little galleries and openings, which are all part of the scoring system.”<\/p>\n
Jones said she began playing ordinary tennis, but got “hooked” on real tennis when she was about 30.<\/p>\n
“I still play ordinary tennis and real tennis, but it’s such a good game, and you can play doubles [and] singles,” she said.<\/p>\n
“It’s played on about 27 courts in Britain, about a dozen in America and a handful in Australia and France, but it means that you get to go all over the world to play in the different internationals and major championships, so it’s great fun.<\/p>\n
“It’s also quite a small game, only about 10,000 men and women worldwide play it, so it’s easy to get to know a lot of the players and it’s a very friendly game.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"She stated: “We’re quite a small rural club right in the middle of the country, and we’ve got…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":544175,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[101,118,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-544174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-sports","tag-tennis","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=544174"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544174\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/544175"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=544174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=544174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=544174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}