Bath have ‘a Ticket to Ryde’

Bath played host this year to the SW Regional Final of the All-England GC Handicap, held on Sunday 13thAugust, and managed by Philip de Glanville, with Martin Leach from Bristol who had very kindly agreed to come over and referee.

There were 10 qualifiers, from all over the South West. Clubs as far apart as Glamorgan at Bridgend across to Blewbury, near Didcott, sent representatives, and we had one outlier from N London who came down to Bath, by special permission, because he’d missed the regional final at Surbiton. Bath had two qualifiers – Neil Pinker and Lyndon Hughes, as reported in mid-June.

The whole competition was played this year as Advantage GC, and we were pleased to find that, again, the average game time was just less than 50 minutes, and that successes were pretty evenly divided amongst the lower and the higher handicaps. The range of handicaps was 11 – 0 and AGC worked equally well for all pairings, with half those playing winning 3 games out of 5. One player – Thomas Halliday, from Enfield – won 4 games, which made him the day’s clear winner, but he was unable to go forward to the National Final at Ryde because of family commitments. Three players had two wins, and one sadly had no wins, though he enjoyed some extremely close games.

Our Bath players were both in the group with 3 wins, but Neil couldn’t accept the invitation to go to the IOW for the weekend 9th/10th September, largely because of the clash with our own Finals day. Lyndon, however, was available, and delighted to accept the invitation, along with Terry Allen from Weston-super-Mare and Nigel Balchin from Glamorgan, so Bath will have a representative at the All-England Final, having won against two GC7s and a GC4, though he was very narrowly robbed of a 4th win by a GC11!

We wish Lyndon every success at Ryde.