Colin and Andy travelled to the perfect lawns and weather of Budleigh Salterton to try their luck at the National Doubles Championship.
A field of 16 pairs including many England (and a few New Zealand) players were split into two blocks on Saturday. Our pair won four of their seven games and therefore progressed to the Sunday knockout rounds.
These took the form of the best of three 13-point games, and kicked off at 9am with the quarter-finals. Colin and Andy won theirs 2-0. In the semi-final they came up against a very strong pairing of Chris Clarke and Helen Reeves of New Zealand. Colin and Andy took the first game but couldn’t maintain their form while their opponents upped their game and finally lost out 1-2.
This meant they were in the 3rd/4th play-off against another kiwi, Jenny Clarke (Chris’s wife and the second best woman player in the world) and her partner, Roger Goldring, a solid, straight-hitting competitor from the UK. Any and Colin took the first game and Jenny and Roger took the second. As they were about to start the deciding game, the final finished on another lawn and so the pull of tea and cake proved too much and all players agreed to shake hands and call it a draw. Honours even. Colin and Andy (and indeed Jenny and Roger) are therefore 3rd= in the 2024 National Doubles Championship.
