Players Return to Vying for Season 3 Honours After Closed Championships

With the city’s annual closed championships recently completed for another year players in the weekly open grade weekly fixture are now concentrating on the last two weeks of matches of the third season prior to a short break during the school holiday period after which a fresh fixture will hit-off.

The next major assignment for a lot of the city’s players will be the annual inter-city matches against the Bundaberg club on Saturday 14 November. This event caters for a variety of playing standard and this year it’s the locals turn to do the travelling so Rocky players are being asked to make themselves available. James O’Sullivan has one very important tournament commitment prior to this inter-city and that’s the National Veterans Championships during late October at Albury as he has been selected to represent the state for the first time.     

In the last round of fixtures Monica Deeth and Pam Clarke engaged in another marathon encounter with the whole match, including the result, being almost identical to their clash at the recent closed titles. On this occasion Clarke won the opening set 13-11 before going down 8-11. She held another advantage when winning the third game to 11-8 but then was run down in the fourth by 12 points to 10. In the decider Clarke had more opportunities to post a victory but was mowed down 11-9 after holding a slight advantage towards the end. Earlier in this team match Deeth had no answers for the solid plays provided by Nick Green.

Current state youth representative Cooper Bulow continues to trouble his more experienced opponents and and in this round he really took it up to recently crowned city men’s open singles champion in Rayden Smith. After a fair spot of bother Smith gained control of the encounter after trailing one-two 11-9, 9-11, 12-14, 11-5, 11-4. Smith also prevailed over James O’Sullivan across four hotly contested sets 11-8, 12-10, 10-12,   

15-13 while in his other singles match Bulow held off a challenge provided by Glen McDonald over five long games after winning the opening two sets.

Former local Gerard Watts, who was in town on work commitments, subbed in the top section and was no match for Joel Gifford who cleaned him up in a straight sets hit-out where Watts just did not get into the game. Earlier in the match Watts struggled to beat Linda O’Sullivan and recovered from loosing the first two sets narrowly to win the next three including the decider 11-8.

Other close clashes included Gifford recovering from two sets in arrears against Sajan Baral to win in five after Baral survived a scare provided by Tom Tonkin to win 12-10 in the decider after winning the opening two games. Warun Wilkinson also had some difficulties with young Tonkin before he won in another five-setter after being down two-one. In an incredible rubber Wilkinson posted another victory when he outlasted Linda O’Sullivan 12-10, 11-8, 8-11, 3-11, 15-13 after losing the first two games.

Hilton Kane looked the goods in both his singles rubbers but ended the night coming up empty apart from the doubles tie where he and Chris Leitner downed the solid pairing of Julien and Oliver Wright in straight sets. In his singles Kane lead both the Wright brothers by two sets to nil but ended up going down to both across five games. If he didn’t already know, Leitner found out pretty quickly how tough it is to stay on top in this competition. At the closed championships only seven days earlier he won the singles event that had an abundance of players from this fixture and on this outing, he was beaten by Julien Wright 11-9, 14-12, 11-8 to again demonstrate the closeness of the leading players in the second division.