We are here in Birmingham for the All England - the most prestigious badminton tournament in the world!
We're playing in the mixed doubles so we're going to
bring you along and show you the behind the scenes of this amazing tournament!
So we're here at the main hall waiting for our practice session and we're currently
watching some of the other teams train
Yeah it's our only time on these courts before we play our match on Wednesday
so we better make the most of it!
We're training with some of the other European mixed pairs, so let's go!
Get it! Oh I could have got that!
One more rally!
So here are the two practice courts just before you go on to court and then what we'll do is walk out
and out into the Main Arena and hopefully the crowd goes wild!
Skipper do you want to be in the Vlog?
Hello everyone I'm He Bing Jiao from China! Smash what? The subscribe sub subscribe okay thank you
That was so good! Thank you! Have a good session. So we just finished a good hour-long session with the other
mixed pairs from Europe we did a mixture of some rally work and also about 45 minutes of points
it's now about quarter to six in the evening and we're gonna head out for some dinner as we
are both very hungry! This is the stocks of water for the tournament, it would be better if they had refillable
bottles, badminton insight bottles! Next year it will just be four pallets of badminton insight bottles!
We've just checked into our Airbnb for the week and unpacked our food and clothes and now we are
going to just start editing this Vlog so we're on top of it and then prepare for what is going to
be really busy but really fun day tomorrow, we'll see you then! Good morning so unfortunately we've
not had a great start to our trip not many people know but Greg is actually allergic to dog and cat
hair and we booked an Airbnb which said no pets allowed and unfortunately we got there and Greg started
sneezing sniffing he had a sore throat felt like he couldn't breathe we rang the Airbnb and they
said oh yeah I think actually someone had brought a dog in there last week so not ideal we managed
to stay there last night but we're gonna have to move today so that's an added stress, added
thing into our schedule today that we weren't expecting we already had a very busy day planned
but we're gonna have to sort it out! But for now let's go to training with the Scottish team...
We've just finished a good hour long practice session with the Scots putting our bad start to the day behind us and now we've got to
quickly go grab some food as we're then off to an exciting meeting! Just finished having a quick
lunch and now we're going to head back to the hall as we've been invited to a meeting with the bwf
and their media production team to talk all things content creation, are you excited Greg?
Yeah it'll be interesting working with them because they're so experienced in what they do they've worked
across many sports such as football and the FIFA World Cup so yeah looking forward to it :)
We've just finished our workshop with the bwf and it was very interesting so thank
you to them for putting on now it is 3:30 and we've still not booked anywhere to stay this evening
so that's the next job! Yeah and some of you might be wondering why we're not
staying in the tournament hotels with all of the other players and that's because they're
$200 a night and we fund all of our tournaments so to maximise the amount of tournaments that we can
play we try and sort out cheaper accommodation.
Okay so that's all sorted now we're going to
try and relax ourselves a little bit by playing some of the games in the players area
Bop it... twist it... pull it
So we've just been watching some badminton catching up with some family and friends that all seem to congregate
at the All England every time this year, Viktor actually just lost the first set
but we can't stay to watch the second and maybe third as we are going out for food!
Okay so we've just had a very enjoyable meal with Zheng Siwei and
Ryan trying lots of different English food and we're also gonna make them
try a Cream Egg the final dessert, see what they think! There you go...
Can't wait! Eggs cheers! Good, quite good, pretty good, very nice yeah!
So that was a very good meal with Zheng Siwei
and his roommate Ren so lots of good chat and we we're trying to help them improve their
English and also give them a taste of English food we're now going to head to our new hotel
and then tomorrow we'll take you through our Match
Day preparations as well as obviously lots more fun stuff we'll see you then
Good morning it is game day we've just filled ourselves up with a good breakfast
and now we're going to do some match analysis and for those who don't know
we're playing Kim and Jeong from Korea and they had a really good week last
week at the German open where they got to the final so we'll definitely be watching
one of those games to see what they're doing well and not so well in their current form
Okay so we've shown you the practice courts and the warm-up courts and now
we're going to take you even more behind the scenes to the media
zone where all of the interviews happen after we come off playing
and this is the media zone so after you finish playing come down through this corridor and this
is usually full of reporters. Players stand here and we get interviewed. So the plan is
to go out and get some lunch and just kind of calm down calm the mind down, relax because this
morning it's been quite all go meeting lots of people which is great but now we just need
to get in the zone so we're focused and we can actually focus on the match
We're about 2 hours away from our match now so the plan is to get our rackets ready, have our final meeting with our coaches to go
through our game plan and then head down there to the practice courts
to start our warm-up so we'll catch up with you after our match, come on!!
and on my left Gregory Mairs and Jenny Moore England
So it's now been three days since our match and we think we're finally ready to talk about it...
Yeah it started off great! We got goosebumps walking out to an
amazing home crowd with people even shouting 'smash the Subscribe button'!
Smash that subscribe button
We played some of our best badminton in the first set
but then when we changed ends we found it really difficult to lift
and control the rallies and then as many of you will know despite having a big lead in the third set
we lost 21-19! And it's way more than just the ranking points and prize money winning in front
of a home crowd at the All England in front of our family, friends and subscribers would
have meant so much to us! Yeah and now we're sat here at home about to watch the pair we lost to play in the semi-final!
Everyone will have these moments in sport though so our challenge now is
to learn from this experience and know that as tough as it is right now it will only make us
better in the long run! And despite losing we still had a very enjoyable week and we loved
meeting so many of you that watch our videos, one guy even said he got back into badminton
after not playing for 35 years because he watched one of our videos which was absolutely amazing to hear!
So a huge thank you for your support and as always don't forget to SMASH the subscribe button!
Smash the subscribe button!