For me, as a one-serve guy, just lefty railroads from the start of play till the match was finished, I needed to spend a prodigious amount of time practising basket after basket of railroads! Scores of baskets each week, a hundred or two of fast first and second serves for the last 15-20 minutes of each session on court on my own, till the consistency was built up to do loads and loads of fast nick serves. (Max in a row was 24 nicks, but of course, that was only in practice, but in the course of a match I was looking to get as many unreturned serves as a big lawn tennis Pro would be able to achieve nowadays).

On the rackets court, Charles Hue Williams and I practised hard together, but mainly it was countless hours on my own, frequently late at night, working on a range of strokes, normally ending with 15 minutes of serving and then shuttle sprints up and down a squash court or across a rackets or real tennis court to finish off.

My commitment was a complete joke compared to, say, Jonah Barrington as a fanatical fitness enthusiast as a contemporary at Squash, but so long as my commitment was greater than the other serious real tennis or rackets players, it was enough to help me win the tight matches more often than not. I was lucky that I enjoyed the practice, though the court sprints were done because they needed to be done, and the satisfaction was having done them, not doing them! But the more often you have pushed the boundaries in practice, the easier it is to push that crucial bit harder and longer in matches.