Lucy Beach won the Wrest Park September Handicap

[<<] [>>] by Eric Audsley at Wrest Park
15th September (AC - Handicap)

Six players contested the annual September AC handicap tournament played at Wrest Park over the weekend of 12-13 September 2026:
From Watford, Jonathan Lambton (4) and Andre Machell (7); from Reigate Priory, Lucy Beach (8), and from Wrest Park, Eric Audsley (1.5), George Collin (1), and Tim Nurse (5).

The format was a single block, all-play-all, and games were played with 3 hour time limits.

Lucy Beach won the tournament with 4 wins out of 5 games, ahead of Tim and Andre both with 3/5.

Everyone arrived on the Saturday to a nice September morning. Grass was growing on about half the lawns and not growing on the other half. It made for somewhat challenging play - very few breaks lasted very long. Thus even one-sided games lasted over two hours (Tim Nurse dispatched George Collin +22) and most bumped into the 3 hour time limit (Eric Audsley beat Andre Machell +9t with an aggregate total of 23 points scored). George was busy watering hoop holes and areas where he had repaired rabbit damage, and was dismissive of a few drops of rain in the evening. Play was paused at 7pm as it was surprisingly gloomy.

Overnight it rained heavily and effectively it did not stop all Sunday. One of the beauties of Wrest Park is you can 'see the hills', or 'you can't'. The successive batches of heavy black clouds could be seen rolling in from the west, some passing to the north, some to the south, and some neither! The lawns became very slow and bare-grass hoop approaches much easier. Arguably crossing wet grass became a barrier. Timed games were limited to Eric Audsley, who beat Tim Nurse +3t in the resumed game and then lost to George Collin -6t. Tim then won +7 against Lucy Beach who had been quietly winning all her other games, to leave them both on three wins and the possibility of a tie, going into the last round. It was not to be. Lucy comprehensively beat Eric and Tim was similarly beaten by Andre Machell. Meanwhile Jonathan Lambton took his ball round to the peg (red rag to a bull), which duly prompted George to do the same and peg him out. However with his single ball Jonathan scored his last 6 points to win by +9.

As we all left, it was not raining!