TOP 8 COMPETITIONS
Published 12/04/2018 at 12:54:47 by Brian Nicholson; edited 1 times, last on 13/04/2018 at 12:06:35 by Brian Nicholson.
Hi everyoneThe final competitions of the 2017/18 season took place this week with the Top 8 nights for all divisions.
Monday saw those for the Premier League, Division 1 and Division 2.
The Premier Division was won by Matt Evans over old adversary Alan Cherry, Division 1 saw Andy Smith beat Minesh Pitamber and the Division 2 champion was Romuald Baucherel with victory over Jacob Midson.
Tuesday evening was the turn of Divisions 3 and 4 and the former saw the ever improving Mervyn Phillips claim top spot with a tight victory over Frank Beck. Division 4 had an unfortunate finish, as in one semi-final between Ping Lo and Tim Welch, the latter suffered a bad fall and injured his leg so that he had to concede the match. Ping then went on to play Rupert Greyling in the final and emerged as the Champion of that division.
Wednesday was for the remaining two divisions of 5 and 6 and although the bottom two, they produced some excellent table tennis and great matches. Division 5 had a strange make up, with three players each from Stony Tennis and St. Christopher Buzzards and the remaining two from OU Penguins. Probably the slight favourite, Graham Silversides certainly got his 'moneys worth' on the night as other than his semi-final against Tim Petzing (which went to four legs) all his other matches went to five. In the end it produced a thrilling final with plenty of crowd participation and slightly unfancied Mark Meagrow came through to win 11-9 in the fifth over Graham. Division 6 was a battle of the youngsters with a number of relative newcomers to the League participating. The final was between Tanmay Tijare and Danny Sedgwick, both fourteen, with Tanmay taking the honours. Special mention should go to another league newcomer, Sue Marchant from Little Horwood, who battled her way through to the semi-finals before succumbing to Danny.
Mention of Danny brings me to the Challenge Cup final which also took place on Tuesday evening between Padbury Night Owls (winners last season) and Greenleys Sovereigns. The latter had a 60 points start and contrived to maintain this over most of the match. This was primarily due to the exceptional performance of Danny in his three singles, to finish 35 points up without the handicap against three experienced players in John Osborn, Ian Warner and Gerry Houghton. Sovereigns won the trophy by 29 points. Team captain John Aeschlimann was magnanimous enough to say afterwards that if he had played himself instead of Danny, then they would probably not have won. However, congratulations to Padbury on reaching the final for the second year running - the Committee will need to look more closely at their handicaps next season!
Well that concludes the final matches for this season and I hope that you have all enjoyed the competition, win or lose.
Please don't forget the end of season Presentation Evening on Saturday 28 April at Mursley.
Regards.
Brian