A fine summers day greeted the intrepid four as they braved the pleasures of the M11 and M25 on their way to play at Enfield Croquet Club in their final handicap league of the season. The two teams seemed well matched on paper with Chelmsford Green fielding Tony Frewin (4), Karen Jones (5), David Dawsey (6) and Ernie Bailey (11) and Enfield East Peter Brock (5), Michael Broadway (7), David Hill (7) and Alan Bateman (9). With David and Ernie winning the first doubles against David and Michael 7-1 things looked good for a short time! The other doubles was close with Tony and Karen going down 7-5 to Peter and Alan. The first round of singles were shared with Karen winning 7-5 over Michael and Tony defeating Peter by the same score. The second round didn’t progress quite so well with a 3-1 loss, Ernie getting a golden hoop victory over David making the match score 6-4 at lunch. Not much to say about round 3 as all games were lost (we must all have been suffering from overeating at lunch!), although David getting close with a 7-6 defeat to Peter the best of the round. This meant that Enfield had the match won but we could at least go into the last round totally relaxed as we had nothing to lose! The last round of singles was an improvement with honours shared, Tony beating Alan 7-4 and Ernie beating Peter 7-3. This gave a final match result of Enfield East 12 (108 hoops) Chelmsford Green 6 (82 hoops), the best performance coming from Ernie with 2 singles and a doubles win. The weather was good and the game was played in good spirits by both teams with fine refreshments provided by Enfield. Apart from the driver (David) deciding to visit a car park by mistake! the journey home was trouble free and we were back in Writtle by 5 o’clock. DD.