Titles for Ashley Shaw and Ludo Montiel

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The annual Club Championships commenced on Thursday with the Veterans' Singles and the Tweenies' Singles. Ten players contested the veterans'event, for over-40s, while only six were present for the so-called tweenies, the inbetweens who are too old to be juniors and too young yet to be veterans!

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While the Tweenies' Singles may have been short in numbers it certainly made up for that in quality with three members of the Cippenham Saxons championship winning team in the Maidenhead League fighting for the title along with three other players of top division standard. The players were split into two groups of three. Oli Shaw won the top group, beating Ricky Hardcastle 3-0 and Igor Liiko 3-1. It was a hard night for Maidenhead League tweenies' champion Ricky who also lost 3-0 to Igor. Ashley Shaw, emulating his brother, also won his group dropping only one game en route while Anthony Gardner played out a winning five-game battle with Michal Garski to qualify for the next stage in second place.

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The cross-over semi-finals produced the match of the day with Oli  getting the better of Anthony by the incredible score of 27-25 in the fifth! Ashley was pushed to four games by Igor but came through safely to set a final between the Shaw brothers in which Ashley triumphed 3-0.

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The ten participants in the Veterans' Singles were initially placed in three groups and the top three seeds duly won through to contest the final group of three. In Group A, Graham Trimming had little difficulty in seeing off the challenges of Milton Makris, Walter Aldridge and Oleg Tretuic with the much improved Milton taking second place. Elroy Hull also won all his matches 3-0 in Group B against Keith Hall and Bhopinder Toor with Keith taking second place. Newcomer Ludo Montiel won Group C, needing a fourth game to dispose of Zsolt Varga but beating Jareslaw Skowera more comfortably and Zsolt took second place.

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The final round robin was a closely contested affair. Graham faced Elroy first and won 3-0 although Elroy had chances to win the second game. Ludo then best Graham 3-2 in a match that could have gone either way. Elroy took the first game from Ludo but then lost the second 14-16 after holding several game points but after that it was all Ludo who eased through the final two games to take the title.

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So, that was Day 1. The Championships continue next Thursday (16th) with the Open Doubles and that is followed by the Open Singles the following Thursday (23rd) and the Junior Singles on Bank Holiday Monday (27th).