The fact that the 1st tee of the Old was reserved for two Club matches will have aggravated things, but we are blessed with four tees t start off from, so it should be ok, right? Wrong... As usual, one of these was reserved for the first hour of play for 2-balls and, unusually, this too had a bit of a backlog. Once we had extracted a four-ball who had not bothered to check from which tee they were allowed to begin their round, we still had 3 pairs ahead of us when we arrived. Clearly there are some deadlines coming up in some of the matchplay events! I was asked if, as Captain, I expected to be given priority but these days have long passed...
Eventually, we teed off at around 08:30 (meaning that the Ladies' groups who had the tee reserved from that time were delayed by 10 minutes - sorry!) and after that the pace of play was excellent with the course moving quickly around. The match itself followed a familiar course: we really must stop winning the first hole and establishing an early lead! Again, our opponents hauled us in with a series of excellent up & downs, and by holing some crucial putts. We played better than we had done the previous time, but still ended up with the same result: a loss by 3&1. Next time we play two former captains so we had better get some practice in!
The rest of the afternoon was dedicated to watching the Ashes Activity from Cardiff. Somewhat contrary to expectations, it was the Australians who found themselves more than challenged by a very disciplined England team. Now why didn't I accept that bet from Brian on an England Ashes victory...?
No comments:
Post a Comment