Eight players with handicaps ranging from -1 to 3 made a strong field for the Ayling Cup advanced association croquet tournament, including Mick Belcham visiting from Tunbridge Wells. Playing in hot sunshine all week-end made for a fine start to High Summer croquet. Peter Nash was the man to beat and started with convincing wins over Farooq and David Collins, +23 and +24, while Simon Whiteley started with a +26 win also over David. By 6pm Mark Ormerod had to leave his game against Peter to go to the theatre but returned at 9am to find himself down to one ball, Peter having pegged out his forward ball in his absence. Unfortunately he had rushed Mark’s ball on to the peg, ending his turn with 2 balls in the middle of the lawn and conceding a contact. Mark still needed some good early morning shooting which he managed with several successive hit-ins to peg out without Peter making any more progress- +8 to Mark.

The lawns by this time were speeding up in the hot sunshine, with Lawn 1 playing as well as ever, and newly re-laid Lawn 2 flat but bobbly with the grass still to fill in properly. Peter picked himself up from his loss to beat Mick Belcham +26 with a convincing triple peel, and looked like repeating that against Simon with 2 peels completed, including a spectacular pass roll penult peel from the north boundary, while rolling to his hoop 5 pioneer slightly misplaced midway between hoops 4 and 5. However he then stuck in 1-back, while Simon was for 2 and 4-back. Simon got going with a well-controlled standard triple peel to snatch victory +8, completing his first ever triple.

David Collins, John Reddish, Mick Belcham and Farooq had a number of close games and were a little unlucky to emerge with only 7 wins between them. Meanwhile Pierre Beaudry and Mark Ormerod had been going steadily and after 5 games these two plus Peter and Simon were in contention for the cup, with one game to play. This could have proved managerially embarrassing, requiring all sorts of complicated comparisons to determine the overall winner. Fortunately (for the manager), Mark Ormerod won his final game against David Collins, while Simon lost to Pierre, leaving Mark as the deserved overall winner on 5 wins out of six, with Peter, Pierre and Simon joint 2nd on 4 wins each. Mark has now won three successive club tournaments this year and is clearly the man to beat!