abFab Kent Classic 2009 at Lordswood

Thank you ab fab flowers for the financial support that made such a big event possible. Kent President Martin Eggleton and Competition Organiser David Baxter present Tony Martin of ab fab flowers with a gift in appreciation of his support.

The fourth running of the Kent Classic saw it moved this year from Detling in the winter to Lords Wood in the summer.

The centre piece of the competition was the Gold Cup with its £500 top prize. In the first stage of the event teams were seeded into 8 pools with the pool winners qualifying for the Gold cup quarter finals. Second and third placed teams went into the silver sections and the other teams into the bronze and consolage.

An early surprise was the number one seeds from Dunkerque losing their second pool game to the Hartley team of Colin Senneck, Joyce and Mick Nash who then deservedly went on to qualify for the Gold quarter final. However, with the number 2,3,4,7 and 8 seeds all winning through to their QF places it was hard fought pétanque all the way to the final. Two teams showing up well in the QF were 24 (Chalkly, Wing, Horrigan,Allen) and 27 (Glover, Binney and Seville) with wins of 13-6 and 13-8 respectively they then went on to win their semi-finals. In the final, team 24 started weakly but the their opponents were not able to capitalise and in the end the experienced team of Wing, Horrigan and Allen won through over their more youthful opponents.

The Kent Classic Gold Cup Winners: Matt Horrigan, Chris Allen, Dave Chalkly and Barry Wing with Tony Martin of ab fab flowers

With so much to play for it was no surprise that concentration, especially when pointing was going to be a crucial factor. Our photographer Jack Milner caught several examples...

We were pleased to see the England ladies team using the Classic as part of their preparation for the World Championships. W e wish them every success in Thailand on November 12-15th

Pictured left to right, Vanessa Webb, Angie Jamieson and Debbie Elcome.

The curtailment. - Games were limited to 75 minutes plus an end. 8 games out of 106 were curtailed short of a score of 13. In five the winning team had reached 12, two were at 11 and one the final score was only 7-5. From an organisational point of view this worked very well as all games could proceed as planned.

The seeding. - This year we seeded the top 8 as 1 to 8 based on previous year's performance, form and reputation and assigned one to each pool. We then assigned 8 teams to be 9= seeds and they were randomly assigned one to each pool. The remaining teams were then drawn into the pools. Organisationally this was quite straight forward and worked well for us, the seedings worked out pretty well also apart from the number 1 seeds from Dunkerque who had a disaster and finished 29th!. 4 of the top 8 seeds finished in the top 8 and 13 of the seeds finished in the top 15.

The highest placed unseeded team was the East Sussex team David Alfred, Tony Mann, Fergal Hogan East Sussex who finished 10th as Silver Cup Runners-up.


Lee Jamieson	Simon Bird	Matt Eversden

Allan Newland	Rachide Hannache	Toni Gates