Minimal (ie normal for Croatia) confusion today…I was scheduled for noon but the schedule was changed when I arrived to 1:30, so we watched the 55 final…one woman from Hungary, Julia Dudics, played the top seed from Austria, Dagmar S. Dudics hit the ball the 1st set and lost so the 2nd set she reverted to hitting every ball straight up in the air…in the end it wore out her opponent, but it was an interesting match, the Hungarian poker faced and the Austrian talking to her friends between every point…Hungary won in the end. Then she had 3 cigarettes according to Bridget, after the match and was chain smoking like crazy before the final!

I won my final, beating the 2 time defending champion from Austria 60 60…Anita Hagner. The prize was 6 days room and board for the tournament next year. We are also in the mixed semis, got a default in the round of 16 and won the quarters over a Serbian pair 92. I think we will play one or 2 matches tomorrow…our semifinal opponents indicated they might not play. Then on to Vienna.

The weather was fantastic again today and the referee mellower as the tournament winds down.

There were chairs for the final…they called all the lines but not any foot faults, the head referee said it was too hard to do that for seniors who had been foot faulting for 40 years and the foot faults didn’t gain them any advantage anyway, and only a few matches are umpired so changing the rules for the final wouldn’t work..then he described some of the blatant foot faults he’d observed during the tournament. It’s definitely a more mellow type of tournament, the bar gets a workout here for sure.