June 27th & 28th, Moira Manager and reporter: Mick
Rachel Gee has won the National Forest GC Championship, recovering from two games down in the best-of-five final against Ian Burridge to win 5-7, 3-7, 7-5, 7-6, 7-6.
Due to the coronavirus pandemic, we had to reduce the number of entries to twelve for this year’s event. The players in block A played on lawn one whilst block B games were played on lawn two. The two top seeds, Ian Burridge and Rachel Gee won all five of their games. The other semi-finalists were Arthur Rowe and Graham Good who won four out of five.
Ian and Rachel both won their semi-finals fairly comfortably in two games although Graham took Ian to the thirteenth hoop in their second game. The two finalists then asked if they could play best of five games in the final and, as we had plenty of time to do this, I agreed. Ian won the first two games 7-5 and 7-3 but Rachel hit back and took the third game 7-5. Ian got off to a very good start in the fourth game and led 5-0, then 6-1. Rachel then produced a quite remarkable fight back and after some very intense and highly competitive play managed to win 7-6. The fifth game was just as close, Rachel led 6-4 but Ian won the next two hoops and it was 2 games all and 6-6 in the decider. Rachel hit a good first ball to hoop thirteen and after few minutes of good clearances ran the hoop to win the most exciting final I can remember in this competition.
Euan Burridge and Tim King both won five out of six games in the plate but Euan’s hoop difference was four better than Tim’s so that was enough for Euan to win another very close event.
The rain mostly held off and there were some periods of bright sunshine and everyone seemed to enjoy the event. Hopefully next year we can revert to sixteen players.
I’d like to thank Martin Wroughton for preparing the lawns, Tim King for setting the hoops and Euan for putting all the results on CroquetScores. I’d also like to thank all the players for taking sensible precautions, playing in a very friendly and good-natured way and for keeping to the timetable, thus making my job as manager very easy.
Full results on Croquet Scores
More photos on the National Forest GC page