Simon & Richard, 2-8, Christie & Alan

There was a record turn-out of 16 pairs for this year’s edition of the CURTC Doubles Championship with the winners being eligible to represent CURTC in the Callender Cup held over the first weekend in November at Wellington College. The group stage comprised of 4 groups with the winners going through to the semi-finals. So congrats to Alan Sharpe & Christie Marrian who won Group A by a slender if not technically the narrowest possible margin, Gerald Smith and Steve Chadwick who emerged from Group B, Dave Isherwood and Marcus Cloke Browne from Group C and Simon Aldous and Richard Lloyd from Group (you guessed it) D who sensibly played all their matches on the first Tuesday evening in September.

Full results are HERE

Sadly the first semi was a walk-overdue to some unfortunate travel plans but the second was an 8-7 nail biter with the Group D winners prevailing. This set up the Final with the Group A winners conceding a daunting handicap to Simon & Richard. Some canny pre Final practicing by both pairs resulted in a fairly dismal warm-up which even the marker (thanks, Mark!) couldn’t resist commenting on. The match itself proved of a far higher quality with some extended rallies and a series of 40-all games (9, if memory serves me well) 8 of which were won by Alan and Christie whose nerves were, in my case at least, somewhat shredded by the time Mark took the photo above! Simon & Richard hung in there and the match was a lot closer than the score line suggests.

Next year we hope for an even better turn-out and we will attempt to facilitate the playing of all of a Group’s matches in a block booking!