Report from Trevor Blows

The Braintree Petanque league and Eastern region will be represented at the Ladies European finals to be held in Slovenia in August.
The Ladies team of Vivien Middleton Sams and Wendy Ridehalgh (Colne Angel), Clare Courtney (Rayne Swan) and Tracey Austin (Onley Arms) won the English triples title at the weekend, beating the Kent representatives in an exciting, but tense, final.
The team finished top of the three qualifying rounds and started the day as top seeds.
They beat the second Eastern region team in game one but just missed out against the Huntley family from Chiltern in Round 2. This put them into a ‘winner takes all’ match against Eastern 2. After a poor start they won through to the final four. In the afternoon session they lost to Kent and found themselves in another knockout decider against Northern. With Northern on twelve points, the girls looked out of the competition but they dug deep to come back and win 13-12 to enter the final. Despite a couple of loose ends and going 5-0 down, the team won through to take the title and a trip to Slovenia. All four girls contributed to the team effort. The pointing of Courtney and Austin, the shooting of Middleton Sams and the alround game of Ridehalgh proved just too good for the opposition over ten hours of play.

Additional piece from Pauline Taylor

Speaking on behalf of Audrey, Marlene, Mandy and myself, just to say that we have all enjoyed ourselves over the 4 days of competition. Marlene as a new player has found the experience very rewarding as have us all. Good team spirit and a lot of fun.
We would like to congratulate Viv's team in coming first, and hope they have success in the future.