A Triumph of Experience over Youth

I remember when I won the RCCC Rink Championship with Graeme Adam back in 1971, the lead of the opposition team said at the presentation after the final that he knew it was time for him to give up as he had just been beaten by a team whose combined age was the same as his – 62. On that occasion youth triumphed. This year while playing in the ECA Mixed Doubles Championship I looked around and suddenly realised (after a quick mental calculation) that the combined age of the six juniors that were also on the ice was less than that of my partner and I combined!

But it was the team that was not on the ice at the time, a combination of experience and relative youth, who were the eventual victors in the English Mixed Doubles Championship at the weekend. John Sharp has won the last three English MD titles playing with Jane Clark, but Jane has decided to have some time off from curling and so John found himself a new partner in Lorna Rettig and they came to the Championships fresh from a win in the Wetzikon MD in Switzerland.

There were originally six entries for the Championship but unfortunately Nigel Patrick and Alison Hemmings had to withdraw when Nigel was admitted to hospital just a few days before, leaving John and Lorna, and myself and Jean Robinson to face the massed ranks of the Kent Juniors!

For the first time in the ECA, LSD was used to determine choice at the first end with each team having five minutes practice before throwing their draw. In the event of a tie for a play-off position the average LSD would be used instead of tiebreakers and so it was very important to get your draws close to the tee. With five teams in the competition even those with a bye went through the practice/LSD routine to give an extra LSD to use in the average.

In the first session the Sharp-Rettig combo swept aside Harry Mallows-Lucy Sparks by 13-1 while the junior pairing of Ben Fowler and Hetty Garnier had a fairly easy victory over Brown-Robinson by 7-2. Session 2 and the first appearance of Anna and Sam Fowler, who were runners-up last year, but against Sharp-Rettig they were to fall to an 8-2 defeat while, in the battle of the juniors, Mallows-Sparks surprisingly got the better of the Fowler-Garnier pairing.

It was in the middle of the next session, when Sharp-Rettig had their bye, that my mental arithmetic about the relative ages kicked in as we were in the process of defeating Mallows-Sparks by 7-3. In the battle of the Fowlers, youngest sibling Ben gained the bragging rights by defeating his elder brother and sister by 10-6.

Sunday morning and a bad session for all the Fowlers as Sharp-Rettig defeated Ben F and Garnier by 9-5 while Brown-Robinson defeated Anna F and Sam F by the same score.

So it all came down to the final session and the game between Brown-Robinson and Sharp-Rettig. A win for the former would mean a play-off was required while the latter would be crowned champions if they won.

While Sam and Anna Fowler scored a full house 6 on their way to defeating Mallows-Sparks by 12-1, Sharp-Rettig had a fairly straightforward victory by 10-3 to win the right to go to Erzurum, Turkey, in April as English champions.

Well done to John on his fourth successive title and to Lorna for winning her first opportunity to play in a World event.

Lorna Rettig and John Sharp, ECA Mixed Doubles Champions. Photo by John Brown.