Paul Bowden reports:
29/06/16: A very successful and enjoyable Westway Summer Superleague competition played throughout May and June came to its final stage yesterday evening with the Final and the Wooden Spoon match.
Ten teams, divided into two leagues of five had started off in early May in their quest to be crowned Superleague Champions 2016. It was good to have two teams from the Jesters to join two Westway teams and two from North Oxford – the Aston House Thoroughbreds and the Aston House Showponies – the Lancing Lionhearts, the Monday Knights, the Exiles and Sweet EFA.
All went extremely well through the group stages, but unfortunately some teams had to withdraw during the knockout stages (perhaps England should have considered that before playing Iceland) owing to unavailability of sufficient eligible players. No matter; the idea of the competition is to provide some friendly summer Fives and the group stages certainly fulfilled that role splendidly.
The result was that the semi finals produced one humdinger in which the Jesters defeated the Thoroughbreds and a Westway derby in the other half of the draw.
And so to finals night. Westway fought hard and pushed Jesters all the way in matches featuring some extraordinarily long and exhausting rallies without being able to chalk up any wins. Many congratulations therefore to the Jesters – Anthony Theodossi, Peter White, Alex Rattan and Harry Turnbull – on being the first recipients of the new Trophy. Congratulations also to Ant Theodossi – already a serial WSSL winner in his Desperados days – for winning the prize for most shots in the hole with a score of 17, over twice the number of his nearest challenger. It is rumoured that he spends several hours every night practising for this at the Berkhamsted courts. Clearly there's not much to do of an evening in Berkhamsted. The prize for most points scored in the tournament went to Aston House supremo Spencer Chapman.
The Exiles managed to ensure that the Wooden Spoon went to the Lancing Lionhearts by defeating them 5-1 in a fun and friendly encounter in the other two courts.
Many thanks to all the team managers for working so hard to produce teams and we look forward to seeing you all again for Superleague 2017.