Sidmouth Journal published 12 July 2017
If I was to emulate Sidmouth Golf, Cricket or Football club’, who write a separate piece on each event, then, as the croquet club’s only correspondent, I would spend most of my days writing match reports, writes Richard Thurlow.
Suffice to say, I have better things to do with my time, for instance playing croquet!
For this reason, each week you read a summary of our many events, which reach a peak about now as it is the height of the croquet playing season.
Apart from recording other exciting things that happen. For example recently, one of our players had to cancel an internal match because of the presence of a fox in his house!
His eyesight, when playing croquet, must be much better than in observing wildlife since, when the RSPCA arrived, the creature turned out to be a seagull!
However, onto the match reports. Our Federation League Association team lost against Cornwall, going down 4-3 at St Austell 4-3, your correspondent managing to lose both his matches! However, his omission from the next match against Taunton, and bringing back the usual grouping of Phillip Harris, Jon Ball, and Andrew Thomas, resulted in a 4-3 win.
Interestingly the contrast between the lawns at those events was very marked; that at Cornwall playing so slowly that St John Ambulance should have been on hand to repair strained wrists, whilst the lawns at Taunton were so fast that it felt as though we were playing ice croquet, (now there’s a new game to conjure up for the winter)
Our SWF Golf croquet match at home against Swanage on proved to be a disappointment for our SE team.
Twenty singles and doubles games were played during the day, with a point to the winners of each game; at lunch we were only one point adrift of Swanage.
We improved after lunch, and with four games still to play, were level with Swanage at eight points each.
However, we could not maintain our momentum and only finally scored a total of nine-and-a-half points against Swanage’s ten-and-a-half.
Philip Harris won all his singles; he is surely truly a renaissance man of Sidmouth Croquet, excelling at Association and Golf Croquet, managing tournaments and being a force for good in this evil croquet world
Finally, I have to make an apology for misleading avid readers for an error in my last match report. I have been asked to point out that Budleigh did not provide lunch when we played away against them last week; we provided our own sandwiches and they provided tea.
Please amend your records immediately.
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