THE ROAD TO EASTBOURNE PIER
The 2024 season introduced me to a Club Friendly and a couple of teams tournaments where I was allocated a handicap of 8 (never a good idea to play well against the club handicapper in your assessment, even if he was making things a li7le easy for me). However, those who know me, will appreciate that I am intensely compe66ve and this intermi7ent compe66on was never going to be enough. So a plan was needed for 2025 star6ng with a trip to the Croquet England website.
By Michael Pudney [Magic Mike]
I’m a Footballer, from the age of 10, I’ve been a Footballer; Youth, Adults, Vets, Walking, it didn’t ma7er. Give me a pair of boots and an inflated pigs bladder and I would put my boots on and kick it around, I have enjoyed every minute of it and s6ll do. So just how did I find myself on my 59th birthday si8ng in an Airbnb on the outskirts of Manchester, in a li7le village called Bowdon, 328 miles from home, spending the weekend hi8ng a 9cm ball around a lawn with a long wooden s6ck, in a tournament for which I was quite frankly grossly underqualified? To fully understand this you would have to travel back in 6me over half a century to a small independent Holiday Camp in Mundesley, North Norfolk, where a toddler was given a mallet far too big for him and encouraged to join his older siblings knocking old wooden balls through what now seem like incredibly wide hoops. Over the next 33 years, for two weeks a year, we delighted in those tradi6onal family holidays and played a lot of croquet. I now know that the race to the finish with extra shots for hooping and hi8ng opponent's balls, is not an official form of the sport (although there are versions in the US that might be similar) but with 300 campers and one lawn, it was a prac6cal use of limited facili6es and double‐banking would have seemed like an unques6onable luxury. When most of the camp was involved in the intensely serious pas6me of bingo and we could get sole use of the lawn, we even played our own interpreta6on of AC.
I quickly established that the C‐series was going to be my thing, a compe66on for those with a handicap of 7 or more. So with the assistance of James at HQ I entered a couple. Well actually I entered 10 or was it 11 or maybe 12 ‐ oops got a bit carried away there. The problem being that the First Tournament was at Budleigh on the 12th of April and our lawns aren't even open then, so besides a few winter tournaments at Southwick, I hadn't played for about 5 months, had never played in a Croquet England Tournament and added to that I didn’t even know where Budleigh Salterton actually was.
But as Baldrick once said “I have a cunning plan.“ I no6ced that there was a tournament the previous week in Bowdon, which was not fully subscribed (I didn’t have any idea where that was either.) Ok, so it was the Cheshire Open with no limit on handicaps with entries from the likes of Ian Burridge ‐1 and Angharrad Walters ‐3 but it was extra prac6ce and I’m a cocky so and so. What could go wrong?
Well apart from the 10 games nothing really. I learnt so much from the experience and actually managed to win 1 game and lose another 2 only on the Golden hoop. More importantly I met some amazingly suppor6ve people. Far from being patronising or ques6oning why I was there, their encouragement was I believe genuine and wholehearted. If anyone out there is thinking about a superficially ridiculous op6on like this, I would say “go for it”. In addi6on my Con nued on page 29
Scan forward to 2024 and I moved to the south coast near Chichester and was looking to sort out new friends and ac6vi6es. I saw an ar6cle about Chichester and Fishbourne Croquet club and thought why not? these knees won’t hold out forever.
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