Quob Stables, Sunday 26th February 2012
The first ever Cobbetts Indoor Doubles saw a very pleasing entry of 62 teams from all around the country. As well as numerous teams from the home Southern Counties region there were several others from the Isle of Wight, Great Western, Sussex, Kent, London, Thames Valley and West Midlands regions as well as from Wales.
Thanks to the sponsors Closewood Air Conditioning Ltd, there were large cash prizes for the winners and many other cash prizes for other placings in all competitions. In total 36 of the 62 teams had a share in the £1650 prize fund.
For the morning play, there were fourteen leagues of four teams and one league with six teams.
The top 32 teams went forward to the Gold Competition knock-out, the next 16 to the Silver and the remaining 14 to the Bronze. There were also Consolage competitions for the first round losers in all three competitions. Despite the challenging surface there was pointing and shooting of the highest standard to be seen in many of the matches.
After an excellent lunch from the Quob Stables kitchen, the afternoon knock-outs got underway.
One of the favourites ‘Half Crown 2’ (Jerome and Rachid) found themselves in the Bronze competition which they duly won. Another fancied team ‘Je Ne Sais Quoi’ (Lee and Didier) were well beaten in the Gold Quarter-Finals by Danni and David from The Ship playing as ‘Barcelona’. Two other Southern teams ‘Harrier Monks’ (Harrison and Mike) and ‘Good Eggs’ (Sean and Kaylee) reached the Gold quarter-finals.
It was no great surprise to see the West Midlands pairing of Herve and Sofiane from ‘Half Crown’ in the Gold final as they are two-thirds of the team that are current EPA Triples champions. In a tense match they defeated ‘Lobbers Inc’, the very experienced Nic Baxter and Marcus Hickman from Kent, to take home the £500 top prize.
There were also a number of good performances by Cobbetts players with Stuart Floyd winning the Silver Competition (with Sam Thatcher). Dave and Richard reached the Gold Last 16, while Sue and Steve got to the semi-finals of the Gold Consolage and Alan and Eric the quarter-finals of the same competition.
Many thanks to Graham Elcome for umpiring and to all those from Cobbetts and Quob who helped make this a very successful day.