Day 164 - Byfleet Bobs

The announcement about the new Burhill General Manager duly came out today: it is to be a certain Matthew Hazelden, formerly a golf professional on the Challenge Tour who switched across to the management side some 10 years ago. He comes to us from a Club in Sussex called Cottesmore - and that is pretty much all that I know.  He will be the 5th GM with whom I have interfaced since I first joined the Men's Committee...

That was the new news today, otherwise it was a normal Vets Club match day. On this occasion, we were the hosts and the opposition were West Byfleet.

The weather was perfect, with just a slightly chilly wind for the first couple of holes and, by the time I came back to my car in the afternoon, the temperature on the dashboard was showing 27°.  That, combined with the fact that Old Course was looking splendid meant that there were no excuses for not playing well.

And play well we did: after 16 holes, I was playing to the equivalent of around 5 or 6 over par, but unfortunately so was one of our opponents (and his handicap was 15..), which meant that we found ourselves on the 17th tee 1 hole down. Then I hoiked my drive left, and my partner, Ian, pushed his second shot right into the hazard.  Not looking good... Fortunately for us though, both our opponents took 3 shots to get down from near the green and we ended up halving the hole. A great par from Ian on the difficult last meant that we had just squeezed a half out of what looked like a certain loss.

Which sounds fine until we discovered after lunch that this meant that the match result was a Burhill win by 7 1/2 to 1/2!  We were the only team standing in the way of what would have been a whitewash. The return match in October will see our Byfleet friends smarting for revenge...