Fives

This was a difficult year. Whilst it was always going to be hard to replicate the success of the 2017-18 season we would have hoped for a less dramatic fall from grace than occurred.

The departure of last year’s school first pair, Charlie Plummer (to Birmingham University) and Iain Kidd (a gap year at Summer Fields) hit us in both Division 1, where Charlie had been successfully playing first pair, and Division 2 where both Charlie and Iain had been mainstays of the side. Furthermore Chris Vincent’s season hardly ever started, with Chris suffering ongoing issues with his knee; and Oli Sander, another whose talents normally span both divisions, struggled with availability post Christmas. All of the above left a considerable gap. We hope to see a lot more of both Oli and Chris in the 2019-20 season, and look forward to welcoming Charlie and Iain, as well as their contemporary Alex Grubb back from university in due course.

The league season was forgettable. In Division 1 we fell just short of making it into the top half of the table for when the league was split, meaning that the best we could achieve was fifth in the final table (which we did). But interest from the players in the remaining games was limited. It was worth giving the new structure a go, but I think in conjunction with a number of other clubs it didn’t really work for us, and we look forward to reverting back to two fixtures against all sides in the coming season. Division 2 was hit even harder by absences than Division 1 leading to us finishing eighth in the table out of 10, and – particularly disappointingly – dropping six pairs over the course of the season.

The season did end of a positive note, with the school first pair who are both U16s playing their first game for us. The work done by Steve Plummer and Andrew Rennie at the school is fantastic, but following the success of Charlie and Iain, there has been something of a lull, and we hope to see Stan and Nick playing a lot more for us next season.

It is worth mentioning the club’s two stars of the season – Andrew Rennie and Jitesh Patel. Both played a huge amount for us across both divisions, often doing so through injury, and having to go out of their way to make work and home arrangements to allow them to be available. The club, and particularly Sunil and I, are hugely grateful to them.

There were some individual highlights worth mentioning. Sunil Tailor reached the semi final of the Kinnaird for the first time, along with his Salopian partner Ed Taylor. Andrew Rennie won the U25s tournament along with his Westminsters partner, Riki Houlden; it’s rumoured that Riki is still sporting a bad back from having to carry Andrew throughout the tournament. Hal Gibson has had ongoing success as part of the strong Oxford University team.

Despite the somewhat negative tone of the above, we look forward to the coming season with optimism. We hope to see more of Chris and Oli, as well as Will Seath and Ollie Avery – imports from Royal Holloway University who will have finished their studies and hopefully moved to London.

The key focus for this year is to run regular club nights to ensure we are providing fives for anyone who wants it. At the moment there is too much focus on the league season to the detriment of the club as a whole. We hope that regular club nights will afford the opportunity to play, practice, and come together as a club which is something that has been lost in recent seasons.

James Hutcheson

Summers Cup Report

This year we had ten pairs competing for the trophy. With some very high quality group stage matches, progression to the semi-finals was not guaranteed until the final match had finished and went down to points scored. The group stages and semi-finals were made up of timed matches with the final being one full game. The first semi-final was between S.Tailor and R.Ebner-Statt vs V.Bhimjiyani and J.Clifford which was a very close game but eventually won by the former 11-9. The second semi-final was between L.Vanhaesebroeck & J.Lewis vs J.Hutcheson and Jake Turner. Jake Turner our youngest player was unable to continue with his aim of being the first pupil to win the cup twice, losing 10-3 in a very high standard match. L.Vanhaesebroeck and J.Lewis went one stage further and put two new names on the trophy winning the final 12-6.