If there's one thing that gets on my nerves during the summer months, when I'm trying to organise tennis teams for league matches, it's lack of commitment.
The excuses some players come up with for dropping out at late notice, make you want to pull your hair out.
And, as with any sports team, it's always the good ones who suddenly find they can't make it because a) they've got to take their son/daughter/wife to hospital for an appointment, b) they've sprained their ankle playing football c) they know they have to work late that day or d) they're going to be away on holiday because they're having a long weekend abroad.
I mean, why can't their sibling/spouse make their own way to hospital? Have they never heard of buses or taxis?
What are they doing playing football when they've got an important tennis match coming up?
How can work be more important than this league game?
And why don't they take three-day European breaks at other times of the week, so that they're around when the match is?
Now, the players who make up the team as a last resort, basically because there's no other two-legged creature you know who can hold a tennis racket . . . you'd give anything for them to have a hospital appointment, break their leg playing ping-pong, be forced to do a 20-hour work shift or fly off to some Pacific Island when, at the last moment, one of your good players, who thought he wasn't going to be around, suddenly becomes available.
What do you do then? Dump the crap-but-always-reliable player? Do that and you'll never have him as back-up again.
I remember organising a mixed tennis tournament at our club involving seven pairs. Because of the odd number it required a lot of planning to come up with the right all-play-all format.
Half an hour before the scheduled start time, I got a phone call from one of the players saying she couldn't play because she'd just had a call from her husband saying that he'd been hurt in a car crash. Several hundred miles away.
Hurt it was, note, not injured. He'd apparently sprained his shoulder slightly and was a bit shaken up.
No, not badly injured.
But she felt she couldn't play in the tournament any more.
Why?
"I'm just too worried," she said.
"But he's not injured and there's nothing you can do," I tried to reason with her.
Yet it was no good.
And so, she sat at home, while for the other 13 players who had put aside a whole day for this, the tournament format was completely messed up.
And, of course, her husband was fine.
Anyway, she's not invited this year.