Phyllis Court's Roberts hits back to secure South Africa win

PHYLLIS Court Croquet Club’s Chris Roberts got his competitive season underway last week with victory in the four-day GC Rainbow International tournament in South Africa.

Having missed out narrowly (on net hoops) from qualifying for the doubles semi-finals last weekend with partner Frances Colman, Roberts made hard work of some of his seven singles block matches during the week at the Somerset West Club, about 45 minutes’ drive east from Cape Town.

He started comfortably enough with routine match wins against Marina Clark (Switzerland) 7-1, 7-1, Caroline Denny (Belgium) 7-5, 7-5, Peter Doble (South Africa) 7-4, 7-2 and John Diamond (Tunbridge Wells) 7-4,-7-3, but had to come back from 5-2 down in his second game against Richard Bennett (South Africa) to win 7-1, 7-6 and remain unbeaten.

A close 2-1 win in his penultimate block match against David Wise (South Australia) was a curtain-raiser for a four-hour marathon versus South African number three Neil McHardy to decide the block winner.

The deciding third game ended under floodlights after 8pm on Wednesday and although Roberts won at the last hoop with a great score from five yards, winning the block did him few favours and a tough route lay ahead in the knock-out that followed.

Roberts did well to beat Spain international Mateao Plazon in straight games 7-5, 7-6 in the quarter-finals only to face top seed Dom Aarvold from Bristol in the semis, where a comfortable first game win was followed by a shaky second that was only lost at the last hoop.

With the momentum, Aarvold might have been expected to capitalise in the decider, but Roberts raced to a 3-0 lead from which Aarvold was never to recover, and Roberts reached the final 7-5, 6-7, 7-3 to face South African McHardy.

McHardy stole a march on an out-of-sorts Roberts in the first game which the Henley man lost 7-2, only to bounce back ready well to win the second game 7-3.

By now Roberts’s clearing game was fully on song and confident hoop running also returned and he bullied McHardy 7-4 in the deciding game to win the title for the first time.

Also in action last weekend, the Phyllis Court A team suffered with the lack of match practice that the English weather had afforded, when they took competitive action at the prestigious Copa Giralda tournament in Seville, Spain.

Although competitive, they lost all four of their short (two singles and one doubles) matches on Friday with Ian Norris’s 7-6 victory over the highly ranked Spaniard Luis de Alcaron the pick of the Phyllis Court players’ performances.

Norris also partnered both Roger Goldring and Michale Marcel to doubles game wins on day one, and the Shiplake man was in his stride on Saturday with a 7-4 win against popular English circuit player Ignacio Gross Alesanco, which springboarded Phyllis Court to their only match win in their last contest of the tournament against Real Club Pineda 4.

Finishing on a high, captain Rick Lilley led his team to a 3-0 victory, with a personal 7-6 win over Jose Luis Santamaria, accompanied by Goldring’s 7-2 win against Maria Jesus Burguete and Norris and Marcel’s doubles 7-5 win over Macarena Galvez and Javier Cejudo.