Jersey
Most of us arrived on Thursday 16th September by various flights. Manager
Stephen Mulliner did not join us till the following morning, but in the meantime we all
had copies of a comprehensive full-colour booklet, expertly produced by Martin Hodge of
the Jersey Club, to inform us of the format and schedule, the players' relative rankings,
past years' results and more besides.
Friday was devoted to five rounds of block games, from which four out of five players
in each block would proceed to the knockout stage, with seedings determined by the
block results. With fast lawns, tight hoops and two-hour time limits, nearly a
third of the games went to time - mostly those between the less expert players
such as myself and Philip Archer (Guernsey), against whom I had results of 9-8 and
18-16. (Our second game was a substitute for the games we had both been scheduled
to play against Kevin Garrad from the Isle of Man, who was ill and unable to play in
the afternoon and evening.) There were no major upsets in the block results;
the top eight seeds took the top eight places, and I came third in my block as expected,
behind Paolo de Petra from Italy and Peter Payne from Switzerland - though if Kevin
Garrad had been fit to play I might well have been pushed into fourth place and only
narrowly got into the knockout by virtue of that one-hoop win over Philip. Paolo
was seeded third in the whole event, and won all his block games, as did top seed
Stephen Mulliner (who failed in his sextuple peel attempts but did complete a straight
triple) and second seed Matthew Burrow (who did triples against all his four
opponents). Fourth seed Samir Patel from England was forced into second place
in his block, on points, by Sarah Burrow of Jersey.
In the knockout on Saturday I got off to a good start against Edoardo Lualdi from Italy,
running hoop 1 (to the north boundary, if I'm not confusing this with another game)
with each of my balls before he started scoring,
but then my shooting deteriorated, he began making breaks and he ended up with a +22
win. All the top eight seeds got through the first round, and the top four were
victorious in the quarter-finals. The quarter-finals and semifinals consisted
of best-of-three matches, but none of them went to a third game, and by Saturday evening
the finalists were identified (to no one's great surprise) as being the 2002 winner
Matthew Burrow and last year's winner Stephen Mulliner.
Those of us eliminated from the main event went into a consolation event, still with
two-hour time limits. I was doing quite well in this at the end of Saturday,
with a +20 against John Swabey of Belgium (my only peg-out of the tournament)
and a hard-fought +1 on time, in driving rain, against Fernando De Ansorena of Spain,
but losses on the final day to Gary McElwain (Wales) and Richard Sowerby (Jersey) put
me well out of contention, though offset by yet another +1 on time against Bruno Hess from
Germany. That left me free to watch the last game of the best-of-five knockout
final - a match that was well worth watching. Stephen had done a TPO on Matthew's
ball and won the first game, and Matthew had replied with a triple peel on his own ball in
the second. In the third, Stephen laid up for a sextuple, but Matthew hit the long
shot and came close to winning, only to break down at rover; Stephen got in again
and completed the sextuple, with an almost impossible half-jump through rover from a severe
angle which sent the peelee a yard or so out of the hoop and got the striker's ball just
far enough through to make a roquet and finish. Matthew took the fourth game with
another TP, but Stephen Mulliner responded in kind in the final game to become European
Champion for the eighth time.
As well as some spectacular croquet, the championships featured a few memorable incidents at
the sides of the lawns. Two on the final day stand out: when Samir's shot in the
third-place play-off was obstructed by a worm and Matthew swooped upon it and made a
convincing threat to swallow it, and when Fernando sat down incautiously on a
backward-tilting bench and went over into the boundary hedge. The hedge was dense
and thorny, as I knew from losing a ball in it for several minutes earlier in the day,
but fortunately Fernando was wearing a hat. The dinners in local hostelries were
also entertaining, even though John Swabey didn't get far with his attempts to inspire
us all to multilingual song. Altogether I can recommend the European Championships
to anyone who may have the chance of selection - though this probably means someone else
will be going next year unless I can fight my way up the Scottish rankings in the interim.
Full results and photographs can be found on the Jersey Croquet Club website.
Fergus McInnes
