Over the summer we have become accustomed to it not raining at all. However, that came to an end on Saturday – possibly earlier, but I was away on holiday. The AC Advanced Super-B tournament took place over the weekend of 29-30 August 2026, and we had quite a lot of rain, to the extent that parts of lawn 2 were noticeably squelchy during Saturday afternoon. Nine players did battle over the two days and everyone said that they had a good time, even those who were less than successful at play. I ran the tournament as a flexible Swiss tournament since that minimises the time that any one player is waiting for their next game. Few games went to time, so that helped to keep things moving. And speaking of things Swiss, Peter Payne had travelled from Switzerland to play in the tournament. If you count Robert Upton travelling from Wales, it was a rather international event.
The lawns were in excellent condition, as one would expect, although as I arrived on Saturday morning, they looked rather like a bilious zebra, with green and black stripes. I have not seen that before!
Several players won many games, but Carl Brown was the only one to emerge undefeated on five out of five wins. He also managed to complete his first triple peel in competitive play, so he will be getting his gold merit award shortly.
As ever, the lunches were excellent and everyone who partook said how splendid the food was. A big ‘thank you’ to everyone who prepared and presented the food.
Postscript
Most of the player left after the presentation of the trophy, but Neil Kingston and Peter Payne were part-way through their final game (which could not affect who won), so Carl and I watched that. The ending proved to be very entertaining. When I started watching, Neil was on 3-back (yellow) and peg (red), with Peter on 4-back and 4-back.
After a bit of interactive play, Neil had a rush on red with yellow to 3-back, which was his next hoop. He made the rush to what seemed to be a good position, but then to the surprise of the spectators (Carl and I) he thought about it for a while and croqueted red to west of hoop 6, getting close to blue and black on the south boundary. Neil engineered a good rush to 4-back and ran the hoop with yellow, only to discover that he had not yet run 3-back! Peter capitalised on the mistake by taking black from 4-back to peg and pegging out Neil’s red ball. Things did not look good for Neil. He managed to make 3-back with yellow, but then Peter made 4-back and penult with blue, he peeled black through rover (he had already scored the hoop point), ran rover with blue gently, and then jawsed blue so that black would have an easy rush to peg so that he could peg out both balls on the next turn. Neil’s yellow was west of hoop 2, a long way from Peter’s balls. Surely he could not hit in. Not only did he hit blue in the jaws of rover, but he managed to get a perfect rush on black to 4-back. He made 4-back, penult, and blue was a good pioneer for rover. Neil made rover and for a final flourish, pegged out one of Peter’s balls, followed by his yellow, for a 26-25 victory. It really isn’t over ’til it’s over.