The Tournament is an open two-day Golf Croquet Level Play Singles competition
for unrestricted handicaps, staged at Watford for the first time as part of the CA's national Open
Series tournaments in the
Croquet Association fixtures calendar.
Open GC Tournament
results by year:
Title:
Golf Croquet Open Series Tournament
Handicaps:
: any
Date:
Saturday 2 - Sunday 3 September
Capacity:
16
Manager:
Simon Hathrell
Secretary:
Eddie Chung :
Eddie Chungclick on link to send an email : 07806 639257
Address: please ask, or log in and obtain it from the
CA member's directory
Entries:
Allocation: 5 June; Closing: 28 August Those who wish to enter and pay online may do so
through the CA website in same way as entering a CA Tournament.
Alternatively, postal entries should be submitted together with entry fee using the standard
CA Tournament entry form.
Entry fee:
£24 (CA Premium members), others £36. Pay online
(see above) or by cheque to the secretary, payable to "Watford
(Cassiobury) Croquet Club".
Format:
AMD, provisionally the standard Series format if full capacity.
Players must be prepared to play up to 8 games per day.
This tournament forms part of the National GC Open Series.
Tea, soft drinks and biscuits are provided free of charge, and a cold lunch will be available for a small fee.
Details of parking and other arrangements will be sent to participants before the event.
After a couple of months of rather dismal weather it changed for the better just in time for this tournament,
and greeted the players with two days of warm, dry and mostly sunny conditions. The numbers had unfortunately
shrunk to 9 with a late cancellation the evening before, so the tournament format was modified to start with an
all-play-all block in which every player received a bye. The top 4 in the block would then proceed to a
best-of-three games knock-out to decide the winner, and the other 5 would play each other again in a 'plate'
block.
There was quite a wide spread of players' Dgrades ranging between 1600 and 2300, plus a newcomer, Ian
Davidson, who had never played in a ranking tournament before and had only been assessed at 8 a week before for
his first handicap.
It became apparent quite soon that Tim King was starting to return to the form which had seen his Dgrade 300
points higher several years earlier, and by the end of the first day he was unbeaten in 7 games, including a
convincing 7-2 win over Nick Archer. Meanwhile newcomer Ian Davidson was trying but not quite succeeding to
upset the form book, his best attempt being a fairly close 5-7 defeat by the -1 handicapper Don Beck.
The second day started with the final round of the initial all-play-all block, and it saw an unexpected 7-5
win by Stephen Webb over Tim King, which relegated Tim to second place in the block behind Nick Archer. The
number of players for the day also reduced even further to 8 when Don Beck had to withdraw with an aggravated
ankle injury, which meant that Ignacio Gross Ariza was promoted into the fourth place in the main knock-out, and
the format of the 'plate' for the remaining 4 players was changed to a best-of-three games knock-out as well.
In the knock-out semi-finals Nick had a fairly comfortable 2-0 win over Ignacio, and Tim won 2-1 in a closely-fought contest against Ian Shore. Then in the final between Nick and Tim, Nick took
the first game 7-5, lost the second 6-7 and took a 3-1 lead in the decider. But then Tim switched into top
gear by winning the next four hoops, including running hoop 6 from 20 yards away and then hoop 7 from the north
boundary right down to hoop 8. Nick was unable to recover from his subsequent 3-5 deficit and Tim emerged the
winner on 7-5.
Meanwhile in the 'plate' knock-out the favourite Ross Bagni emerged the winner beating Andrew Carpenter 2-1
in the final.
Open AC Midweek Advanced
Open GC C-Level
:
: 07806 639257