In this year’s CURTC Doubles Championship four groups of teams played off handicap over the summer in a round robin format to compete for places in the semi-finals. In the semis, Group A winners Lloyd and Aldous (75) were beaten 8-3 by Glasscock and Godsill (62), off a tough handicap difference of 13. In the other semi, Pearson and Brown (27) beat Menzies and Marsh (46) 8-7 in a very close-fought and entertaining battle, an even bigger handicap hurdle for the winners. This of course left a very tough handicap difference of 35 for Pearson and Brown vs Glasscock and Godsill in the final, and this proved too tough even for that very high quality tennis pairing, and they lost 8-2, to give Glasscock and Godsill their first ever club title (and indeed their first real-tennis honours of any sort!).

Winning the CURTC Doubles gets you an invite to compete in the Callender Cup at Wellington College, Nov 1-2. This is a national competition off handicap, where all of the participants are winners of their club’s handicap doubles, and a record 15 teams were present, including as wildcards last year’s Oxford Winners Charania and Ault. There was some very high quality tennis to watch from some low handicap pairings in the round robin phases. We (Glasscock and Godsill) proceeded with 3 solid 8-1 wins through the round robin on Saturday and the quarter finals on Sunday.

At this point we came up against the very strong local Wellington pairing in the semis of Mark Harris and Nigel Hall (40) (Hall is an ex-Cambridge varsity player and ex-Corpus Christi student from the 90s), a team that we had watched with some trepidation in the round robins and quarter final. With their skill and local court knowledge they managed to take a 4-3 lead. We then started playing more sensibly to our strong handicap advantage and  pulled back to win a memorable 8-6 semi-final.

Enter the dark horses of the tournament, the junior pairing of Bartlett and Gee (80) from Holyport, who were like us unbeaten in the tournament thus far, beating last year’s winners Charania and Ault in their semi-final, in a hard-fought 8-5 win. We probably stood the best chance of anyone of beating them, with only 20 handicap difference in their favour. However, we made a few slips in the opening games of the final, which let them take a 5-1 lead. We then made a strong recovery with some excellent cross-court hitting by Glasscock and some effective high and underarm twist serves by Godsill that brought us to 7-5 against, still in trouble but in with a chance. The pressure was too great however, and the youngsters took the final game to win 8-5. In the end their high quality serving, some excellent winning `gets’ and some unforced errors by us were too much to beat the handicap differential. Congratulations to them, but we were more than satisfied with the progress we have made this year. They won Extratec racquets and we won printed tennis balls, grrr… Onwards and upwards!

Many thanks to the pros Adam and Danny at Wellington for a well organised and fun tournament.

Simon Godsill