Why the hell not? I thought to myself as a friend invited me for a game of padel at her Oxfordshire members’ club, the grotesquely baroque Estelle Manor. As a self-confessed tennis head, I thought this might have the same feel of the restrained geometry and simmering tension of the tennis court that I have spent a lifetime admiring. I imagined a game close to squash but with the lightness of ping pong and the clipped etiquette of tennis. How wrong I was. Padel, I am sorry to say, is a disgrace. Not simply because it apes tennis in unfortunate ways, but because it is deeply uncivilised, like a dinner party with paper plates. Doubles players grunt and lurch around holding carbon fibre bats that look like squashed colanders, and the scoring has none of the absolutism of the tennis game becaus

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