The second leg of the Winter Friendly against Caerleon RFC PC was played today at Monkstone PC. Mike Jones, Monkstone President, welcomed the visitors from Caerleon and Bernard & Gemma announced the teams for the first round singles. Caerleon had a mountain to climb after the first leg which Monkstone had won by a massive margin of 58 points to 4 but Monkstone had added some less experienced players to their squad to give them the opportunity to play against one of the top clubs in the WPA. With a squad of 17 players, most would play in 2 of the 3 rounds.
Monkstone knew they only needed 5 points to retain the Winter Friendly Trophy and when they took the first three singles the game was up for Caerleon. Caerleon put up a great fight and at the end of the round they were only down 7 games to 5 and 14 points to 10.
In Round 2 Caerleon continued their much improved performance from the 1st leg and the doubles were tied at 3 games and 9 points each. Overall the score was 10 games to 8 and 23 points to 19. Even though the match was lost for Caerleon they had a chance to win the 2nd leg by taking 3 of 4 triples.
The 3rd Round got underway and it soon became obvious that unless there was a complete batting (sorry bouling – still scarred by the Ashes) collapse by Monkstone, Caerleon were not going to get the 3 wins that they needed. With Monkstone taking the first 3 games to finish, Caerleon were hoping to salvage something from the final game but Monkstone just nicked it 13-12 for a clean sweep. This made the final score 14 games to 8 and 43 points to 19 in Monkstone’s favour.
The overall score for the competition was 34 games to 10 and 101 points to 23 to Monkstone.
In our tradition (well we did it in the report of the 1st leg!) of naming and shaming, there were only two players who lost all their games and only two players who were fannied – in fact it was the same 2 players, Keith Nott & Peter Kensett.
It only remained for Gemma to gallantly present the trophy to Monkstone captain, Bernard Adshead.
And so we look forward to next winter’s edition of this well named “Friendly” competition when Caerleon are going to be looking for revenge and trying take the trophy back their club.
