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Winner: David Maugham
Runner-up: Brian Smith
Losing SFs: Tim Wilkins & Jenny Williams

Consolation Event

1st: Tim Wilkins
2nd: Jerry Guest, Samir Patel

Handicap Changes

Brian Smith: 0 to -0.5
Kathleen Priestley: 1.5 to 1
Collin Southern: 0.5 to 1

Silver Medal

Brian Smith

Report

"Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment" (Barry le Patner)

A quality field for this year's Gold Cup was steam-rollered by The Beast, who did not drop a game and finished half a novel during the weekend.

The lush, well-watered lawns of Roehampton were like an oasis among this summer's brown courts. Controversially, Roehampton also used Omega hoops, which were, as usual, found to be very easy to run. These two factors combined made the conditions benign and there was a high proportion of triples. In fact, we expected sextuples, but only Jerry Guest was trying, attempting to show that his recent successful sextuple in a Surbiton club game was no one-off.

Brian Smith played well to reach the Bo3 final, and won a silver medal, but Maugham saw him off in under two hours. The consolation swiss was a closer event. During the second day Jerry Guest, Samir Patel and Kathleen Priestley all threatened, but only Tim Wilkins kept on winning, with a final score of 7/9.

It is good to see this formerly prestigious event becoming more popular again after a few years of relative neglect. The Roehampton committee has promised iron hoops and faster lawns next year. So with more challenging conditions the trend will hopefully continue.