Successful trip to Eton for Fives Tournament

Home » News » 2012 » January » Successful trip to Eton for Fives Tournament

Sunday 22 January – REFECA U14s Tournament

12 pupils travelled down to Eton to represent Rydal Penrhos in an excellent weekend of fives at the REFECA U14s Fives Tournament.

The team travelled down on Saturday afternoon and after a 4 ½ hour journey arrived in Eton, a little more tired than when they left! After checking into the hotel we toured the school and had a quick knock in the courts before an evening meal.

Sunday came and after a good breakfast, we had some time to kill so we visited Eton’s original fives court situated on the side of the chapel. This was a great experience and everyone was able to have a go at playing fives and experiencing how much the game has evolved.

The tournament was an individual competition where the participants would play with different partners and the best 4 players after 5 rounds would take part in a final. The tournament started at 1pm and by this time everyone was raring to go and the first round of matches took place. We performed extremely well considering it was our first experience of this style of tournament. In particular, Matthew Harding, Tom Cotterell and Shaswath Ganapathi played extremely well and won all of their games against some very tough opposition. Sam Merrick, Daniel Phillips and Adam Sabri also performed very well. However, losing one of their games meant they weren’t able to progress through to the latter stages of the competition.

As the tournament wore on, it became obvious, due to the large number of entries, that there would be more than 4 finalists that hadn’t lost a game. This was proven true at the end of the tournament as there were 8 pairs and the four finalists were decided from a challenge of the quality of their shots. Shaswath progressed into the final 4 but unfortunately for Matthew and Tom they were unable to match the quality of the opposition. However, getting to this stage of the competition is a great achievement and they should be very pleased with their overall performance on the day.

The final began with Shaswath and his partner taking on a highly fancied St Olave’s pair who had won the same competition the previous year. St Olave’s took some early points and stormed to a 6-2 lead but Shaswath produced some breathtaking fives to bring the score back to 6-6. Again they let the lead slip and were down 11-8 until they brought it back to 11-11 with a great display of mature fives. However, when it counted, Shaswath and his partner were not able to make their chances count and lost the game in a very tightly fought affair.

Rydal Penrhos School was very well represented and the attitude of pupils both on and off the court was the reason for the weekend being so successful.