[<<] [>>] by Marcus Evans
8th July 2006 (AC - Championships)

Just to add a few more notes on the tournament, which will be necessarily centred on my games I'm afraid.

Firstly, there was an error in Dave's penultimate set of results - I actually lost to Death -10 having pegged out both his balls. I was in a hurry to finish in order to get a lift home. The manager saw me pegging out two balls and clearing the lawn, James told him "10" so he assumed I had won, but sadly this was not the case - I finished from 4 and 4 v rover and peg, obtaining the clips.

Today conditions were very easy once again, with lawn eight timed at about 10 seconds in the evening. Hoops set tight but very forgiving. Here is a short report of Clarke & Fulford v Death & Evans:

Game 1

C & F win toss and elect to go first; D & E choose R & Y respectively.

1. U (Clarke) supershot.
2. R E boundary 1 yd S of peg-high.
3. K misses R into IV.
4. Y misses R from A-baulk.
5. U misses Y, leaving 1/4" rush S.
6. Y taps U, gets rush on R to IV. Obtains corner cannon, hoop 2 ball perfect but rush to 1 short. Overapproaches and sticks in hoop with K nearby.
7. K to 4-back with tight MSL, R at 2.
8. R hit U centre-ball from A-baulk. After some thought by E while D makes first hoop, goes to 1-back, attempting but failing to pop U through 1 on the way to 5. Hoop and roquet after 6 so cross-wire is made only with difficulty, almost horizontal with U almost on W boundary, K close to hoop.
9. K misses tea lady shot.
10. Y rolls off 1 from U having got K in front of 4-back and R in front of 2. Does standard TPO, peeling rover before 2-back. Jawses R in 1-back before 4-back, rush peels it before penult. Pegs out Y and K leaving R peg-high on W boundary such that 5 is in the way of approaching 1.
11. U takes contact, gets long angled position at 1 and fails hoop to W boundary.

There was not a lot of interaction in the two-ball game, D & E preferring to let C take position and run his hoops rather than risk shooting. R was able to run 3-back with U in front of 3, but didn't get through far enough so had a 15-yard shot at the hoop, bouncing off to the end of B-baulk. U missed the subsequent 7-yarder, but R's approach to 4-back finished short.

Eventually, R ran 4-back with U in front of 2-back (after some good long hoops by U), and elected to take position at penult despite the impending lift. U hit the lift from B-baulk but was only able to bounce R off penult to the W, finishing about level with it. The roll up to 2-back was short and U stuck in a gently-attempted hoop, R close by. R took a 2-yard angled shot at the small amount showing, hit the hoop and missed, bouncing 2 feet W. However, since this had moved U, it was entitled to a wiring lift, which was taken from A-baulk. U hit the 6-yarder at R by 2-back and finished.

Clarke & Fulford +3OTP (E)

Game 2

D & E choose to go first; C & F choose Y & R respectively.

1. U (Evans) supershot.
2. Y misses gently from I.
3. K makes a double from A-baulk, hits and goes to 4-back leaving all the balls in a horizontal line near maximum-distance position on W boundary, no double targets from baulk.
4. R hits from A-baulk, goes to 4-back popping U to 3 with reverse MSL, K in the jaws of 2, rush pointing behind 2, no double targets from baulk.
5. U misses R from B-baulk.
6. Y finishes with standard TP.

C & F +15TP (C)

This finished sufficiently early for James and I to enter the Z knockout.

After several attempts to give my game to Brian Cumming, he almost completed a delayed TP from 3 and 4-back, just rushing partner too far to peel rover.

He peeled rover posthumously and pegged his other ball out, leaving a 9-yarder at his ball from baulk and my two balls in the lawn but nowhere useful (I'm for 3 and 1-back at this point). I hit and fail 1-back with his shortest shot being at the peg (9 yds or so). He hit it gently and it hilled off. I joined on the N boundary and he missed the peg again from W boundary near 4.

I played a stop-shot approach to 1-back, made it, hit his ball on the boundary and went to peg, leaving his ball near S boundary wired from the peg by hoop one with my balls guarding III. He went to peg-high W boundary, I made 3, rushed to W boundary, failed to get a rush on his ball to 4, rolled it off from near 1, rolled to 5, ran a 2 yard 30 degree hoop, finished cross-pegged on his ball (near the peg), hit partner which was near the boundary by 1-back and finished!

I'm boring myself here so I won't do this again unless people are interested by this sort of thing. Other snippets from today include James Death doing two sextuples in consecutive games for the first time (one 5th turn), in a blatant attempt to upstage Samir Patel who completed his first ever tournament sextuple, including approaching 3-back with a take-off near 4-back! Congratulations (and a platinum award) to him.

Today also saw Keith Aiton complete his hat-trick of losing to Canadian triple peels, though sadly this final one was not 5th-turn like the other two. Keith also had a sextuple of his own having relentlessly practised failing them yesterday.

There are bound to be many more interesting events that I have missed or misrepresented, but I'll leave those to others. I'll just end with a final addition to some earlier days' results: the second game of my first round doubles match ended with a fourth-turn triple, which is probably quite rare for doubles; Fulford and Kirby's five games contained just 27 turns, almost certainly a record; and in my first game against Matt Burrow, Rob forgot to mention that Matt took a contact after my TPO against him. Of course, since I was already for 4-back, he wasn't entitled to one, a fact neither of us noticed until it was pointed out after the game! Luckily, it didn't affect the result.

I'll try to do some reporting of the finals tomorrow if nobody else does (and I promise I won't mention me!), but that's quite enough for now.