Tournaments 2014
Sheffield retain Millennium Trophy
The Annual Yorkshire Federation AC Short-lawn tournament took place on Sunday 18 May 2014, a gloriously sunny Spring day, at York Croquet Club The Sheffield team came up against teams from York, Beverley, Huddersfield and Ryedale in attempting to retain the trophy that they had won in 2013. All the matches were played in a very friendly spirit, but the competetive nature of the tournament meant that everyone had to maintain a high level of concentration throughout. York and Sheffield were neck and neck all the way through the tournament, and going into the last round, York had to win all their games to give them victory outright. Sheffield had to sit out in the final round and could only watch and wait - but York lost one of their final four games. That meant that both teams had won 3 matches, and both had won 10 games in the process; Sheffield managed to scrape home in the final analysis by scoring 4 more hoops than York ! Hard luck to the York team who were very gracious in defeat, but congratulations to the Sheffield team of Alan, Maggie, John & Adrian. Adrian just managed to win the Armada Plate for the best individual performance. For more details, Click here to visit the York Croquet Club site
Lancashire International Open GC Championship
The 14th Lancashire International Open GC Tournament took place at Bury Croquet Club over the weekend 3/4 April 2014. Adrian & Dennis again ventured across the Pennines to try their luck against the great and the good of the croquet world. There were 16 entries, including two young young New Zealanders, who were amongst the 8 'seeds', six of whom had a -1 handicap ('professionals') as opposed to the rest of us who were really only club players ('amateurs'). As always in these type of tournaments, it's level play and, on Saturday, 19 point matches were arranged in two blocks of 8 players, each containing 4 of the 'seeds'. Play started at 9:00am and didn't finish until dusk. Each of our stalwarts managed to beat one of the 'seeds', winning three of their seven matches - not enough to get into the knockout stage.
On Sunday, in addition to the main knockout event (best of 3), there was a consolation event for the other 8 players (all v all). Heavy rain in the afternoon made play even more testing but both our players won more than half their games, the decider between them being the last game of the day !
The winner of the main event was James Hopgood, who beat Paddy Chapman (NZ) 2-0 in the final.
More information can be found at:
http://www.croquetscores.com/2014/gc/lancashire-international-open-championship-eng/block-b
YCF Tournaments for 2014
Several YCF tournaments have been planned for the 2014 season, including:
AC Short-Lawn tournament on Sunday 8 May at York
GC team event on Sunday 13 July at Huddersfield
GC Singles event on Friday 8 August at Parkhead, Sheffield
AC Full-lawn tournament on the weekend 6/7 September
It is anticipated that SCC would be represented at some, if not all, these tournaments