This year’s Cambridge Weekend featured a new Team Mixed Doubles Tournament, an ‘A Grade’ Doubles tournament for those too under handicapped to qualify for the aforementioned TMDT and myself commuting from Cambourne (don’t ask). For the (don’t ask) reasons, I can’t normally play over the Cambridge Weekend so I was eager to find out how mixed was my tennis these days as I am too over handicapped to qualify for ‘A Grade’ status. The answer was very… Mind you the format of the tournament was a step outside my comfort zone as we each played three matches of two (yes two) sets each.
To avoid complicating the organisers already somewhat complicated lives our Mixed pairing chose to lose (mostly) or win (occasionally) both of the two sets. However, our team mates were not so thoughtful as they chose to sometimes win one set and lose the other (or vice versa), prompting the perfectly reasonable question as to whether they had won (or lost)? In any case, the organisers were one step ahead of us and simply added up sets won (which in our case was rather easier than adding up sets lost) to determine the the winning Team without answering our team mates aforementioned question directly. In any case it was all very enjoyable and as nobody really knew who was going to win we all kept on merrily hacking away under the vague illusion that there most be some way that our admittedly increasingly dismal scores could translate through some fiendish algorithm into a Team C victory.On Saturday afternoon, we were joined by the other Doubles tournament played under a more usual scoring arrangement. However, the organisers had clearly anticipated that this arrangement would be disappointingly uncomplicated for the participants so they chose to mix things up a bit through a few typos on the scoresheet, see photo. So again nobody really knew who had won that Tournament either!

Eventually it was all sorted out, bottles of Pol Roger were handed out to our worthy winners (thanks Pol!), we imbibed the rest and I went back to Cambourne which was where I had started the day…