Wargrave players on the road with tough clashes in Woodley and Tilehurst

WARGRAVE had two matches this week, an away Kennet League match followed by a thrilling away friendly at TILEHURST.

In the Kennet League, Wargrave were looking to score a second win against WOODLEY, but it was not to be. The scores were similar: 87 shots to 63, 12 points to 2, but this time in favour of Woodley. Without a doubt home advantage played a large part in both these games.

Wargrave’s single winning rink, Tony Simms, Maurice Freeman, Brian Turnbull and Keith Sykes, clearly coped better with the long ends on the excessively heavy Woodley green.

When looking further into the statistics of the match and counting the number of ends won by each team, the figures suggest a much closer match than does the result.

For example, Woodley won 37 ends and Wargrave won 35 ends. Clearly, if Wargrave were able to reduce the number of ends which they lost by four or five shots, then they would have achieved greater success.

The Sunday friendly away to TILEHURST was a thriller.

On rink two, Wargrave dominated from the start winning 14 of the 18 ends. All players contributed consistently, making a winning combination. Tilehurst tried many times to reduce a sometimes five or six up, but often only succeeded in reducing the count instead of taking the win. The final score was 7-28 to Chez Annetts, Ray Trussler and Keith Sykes. Rink three also won 15-28.

On rink four, a highly skilled Tilehurst skip became the dominant force against Wargrave. Eight times a winning five or six head to Wargrave was stopped by the last wood of this outstanding player despite the valiant efforts of Tony Annetts, Ian Robbins and Norah Holder. The final score was 20-8.

It was a similar story on rink five with Wargrave on the losing end of 21-9. However, the overall score meant the match was a draw at 63-63.