Report – CITCO round 5 – Preisch – 17 June 2015
Wednesday night saw 26 FROGS descend on the France course, at Preisch for round 5 of the CITCO Grand Prix.
Neil Underwood set-up the starters banquet hall off the back of the 1st tee. His Sild och Snaps was approached cautiously by a lot of FROGS – some feared the schnapps – more feared the old fish! Turns out both were delicious. Still not sure how he managed to be able to serve hot meatballs all evening! Are the starters now bringing ovens in order to cater for the event? Great performance Neil, thank you.
It was looking like the standard of golf had dropped significantly when the database suggested standard scratch for the night was 8 points! Even with so many doom & gloom stories in the courtyard of café/restaurant Klein, surely it couldn’t have been that bad … could it?. Upon investigation, it appears the database had expected quite a number of you to be playing off scratch by now so it had done away with your FROGGIE-caps. As it wasn’t Andrew Paton at the keyboard user error was ruled out, so pencil-tips were licked and scoring was done the way out ancestors used to calculate them.
Rob McCorduck was the first to mark his name down on the Long Drive sheet. It was pointed out to him that in order to qualify the drive has to be a) long & b) on the fairway and his was neither of these. Ian Doherty thought he had bagged the prize for a second week running, but Steve ?? stepped up to deny him & claim his second set of long drive froggie-balls this season.
Luc de Vet & Arnaud Bouteiller both hit decent shots into the eighth green, but left too much space between themselves & the pin. Andrew Paton took the NTP award for the best shot on the short hole.
Subject to ratification by the laptop once we manage to wind it back up again, here are the results at the pointy end of the leaderboard:
With 18 points, countback calculations were needed to find that Graham Paul’s better finish put him ahead of Dennis Robertson, but this was only good enough to earn 4th & 5th respectively.
Since no one scored 19, surely you would think 20 points is enough to take the coveted first place, no?
20 points is not good enough if you put two balls into the trees from the teebox on the last hole! This will only get you 3rd place, William Heath.
A steadier finish to earn 20 points & a fine score by Duncan Tippin, but it was only good enough to give him second place.
20 points is good enough if you scored 6 of them in the last two holes, and this is exactly what Stéphane Ayache did to claim first spot. Is this the start of Steph’s run up the leaderboard to reclaim the position he held in 2013? 4 more similar rounds will see you beat your own 93 point record, Steph.
There were two nervous FROGS, who from experience, knew that their 8 point scores were enough to earn them the Pink Ball. Their nerves were eased slightly when they saw one eager FROG had come dressed for the award in splendid pink shorts. Peter Baxter continued to make them feel a whole lot better by refusing to give much away about his scoring, other than letting slip that he lost his matchplay ‘by some margin’. So it seems Tiger had it right all this time with his last day red shirt – what you wear does influence how you play! Peter, you are obliged to tee off at the next CITCO event with your new pink ball, but feel free not to wear the shorts next time – that is unless you want another 5 pointer?.
You will have to wait a while for an update on the overall CITCO Grand Prix leaderboard but all these 20 point scores will be making Andrew Paton nervous, particularly Duncan Tippen’s, as he previously held second place after round 3! Andrew will definitely have lost some of his 13 point lead at the top of the table.
Thanks to our main sponsor CITCO for their support.
Colin Cameron has already been in touch with everyone to ask for your preferences for the next CITCO event at Kikuoka on June 24th. Do get your requests in early as the bank holiday on Tuesday may add some challenges to the communications.
SHRM Matchplay
A plethora of SHRM Matchplay result were decided in the last two weeks.
Results handed in throughout the last fortnight:
Francis Parisis dispatched Gregor Dalrymple 3&2.
Andrew Botfied beat Luc de Vet
John Brophy was seen off by Merve Herneman 1up
Derek Sinclair conceded a walkover to Peter Baxter
William Heath beat Stuart Rowlands
Wednesday night saw
Stephane Ayache only needed 5 holes to conclude his match against Peter Baxter
Dennis Robertson beat Dave Winters in a closer affair
Rob ‘short & wild off the tee’ McCorduck succumbed to Alan Botfield after 1 extra hole
Arnaud Bouteiller defeated Johan Terblanche 2up on the last
Round 2 matches have until June 24th to be settled.
Thanks to SHRM for their continued support of the Matchplay event.
