Disgusted with myself

Yesterday was a stressful day for me. I had an important assignment lined up last night in Long Island City and I knew that I might have to miss our match (at Musical Box). Our team was short-handed as it was so and it was looking more and more like we'd be forfeiting the fifth match. After getting the sheet over to Sophie's around 4PM, I headed home to get ready for my trek to LIC. Then my phone rang and I decided to take a last-minute assignment that, if I was lucky, would only take 30 or 45 minutes. So I ran off to shoot that and very fortunately the timing was perfect, such that I got my shots and was able to walk back home and still have plenty of time to transmit before leaving for the second assignment. The trip to LIC went smoothly and the assignment there went very well (I even walked out of there with check in hand!). But it was 9:30 by the time I got to the 7 train and I was worried I might not get back in time to play. Fortunately, the trains were running on time and I made it to 13th and B just after 10. When I got there I was stoked to discover Abdi and Slima had convincingly won their matches; both had shut out their opponents. Chris was well on the way to winning his match, ahead 2-0 against a SL5, only one game away from winning it for us. But stuff went south and the SL5 caught fire and came back to win four games in a row. It was tough to watch.

Needless to say, that put the pressure on me to do well in the rubber match. It was their turn to put up, and they put up a SL3. I lost to a SL3 last week and it wasn't pretty. Since I am a SL5, I had to win four games whereas my opponent only had to win two. Somehow I lost my grip and my opponent won the first game, putting him one away from the win. But I hung on to win the next three games in a row and was in the final game of the night when I got to this seemingly simple runout (above). I wasn't quite straight-in on the 2, and I wanted to be sure the cue ball came off the rail and back toward me slightly so that I would have an easy shot on the 8 into the upper left corner pocket. I decided on some bottom left english. But as the title of this post suggests, I flubbed it horribly and hit it with a hard/jerky/pokey stroke and the cue ball drifted forward and to the right. I was left with a horrible angle on the 8. It was makeable but I was afraid of scratching into the top center pocket. I ended up under-cutting the 8, and put stupid right english on it (I think bottom english would have been okay to just pull it away from the long rail). My opponent went on to make two pretty nice shots to win the match. And I have to hand it to him, he stayed focused on the 8 where it would have been easy to collapse under pressure. Still, all day I've been thinking about how much I would have preferred to have sunk that 8 and scratched into the side, as opposed to just plain missing it and having to go back to my seat and watch him run the table. One way would have just been bad a roll, but the way it ended up played out was just a slow, painful death.