County Boys Team Win The Severnside Tournament At Worcester G&Cc

County Boys Team win the Severnside Tournament at Worcester G&CC

The victorious U18 County Boys Team at Worcester G&CC, with the Severnside Trophy.

Pictured (l-r) Dave Hall (Worcester G&CC Captain), Ian Henry (Team Manager), Hugh Adams, Ted Pickering, James Bishop, Aaron Bryan, Jack Severn (Team Captain), Harrison Leaver, Tom Wakeman, Harvey Jones, Roger Martin (Assistant Team Manager), Jane Fellows (Worcester G&CC President) & Dave McGillivray (WUGC President).

Please click here for full score board.

The prestigious Severnside tournament annually moves between each of the four counties, and this year it was Worcestershire’s turn to host. Worcester Golf & Country Club accepted the opportunity and there was no better venue with quite a few of the squad members at the club.

The format for this competition is a round robin played between Worcestershire, Gloucestershire, Gwent and Glamorgan. Each team has eight players and they play singles matchplay, with the first 7 matches counting towards the tournament result.

Worcestershire’s first match was against Gwent, and what a tightly contested match that was! Hugh, Jack and Harrison put three points on the board early, so the home side just needed one more point for an opening victory. However with just two games left out on the course we were one down with four to play in both. As the majority of both teams watched on Harvey and Tom took their games down the eighteenth hole, and thankfully for us Harvey managed to put his approach close and pressurise his opponent into missing the green. He couldn’t get up and down so we had the crucial half point to avoid defeat. Unfortunately Tom's game came to an end in similar fashion with an heroic iron shot from the Gwent player and that meant the opening match ended in a draw.

Match two saw us play Gloucestershire in a huge game that we had to win. Again this was a very close contest, but Worcestershire had narrow leads in almost all the games through the early stages. Gloucestershire mounted a fight back between holes twelve and fourteen, and watching on it felt like the momentum had switched. Despite the switch in momentum Jack, Harrison and Ted dug in and all hit fantastic shots into the seventeenth hole to close out their games, a brilliant display of grit. James and Tom completed the victory on the sixteenth and set us up with a fun afternoon match against Glamorgan.

In our final match against Glamorgan we knew we had to win as big as possible because we needed to better Gwent’s result against Gloucestershire. The boys were ready and focused only on their own point.

It was Jack and Teds final appearance for the boys so they were determined to deliver, and so they did. Jack stayed strong and Ted dug deep to deliver a point and a half in their final games. The boys down the order played very well and we only conceded one point to Glamorgan, which was a fantastic achievement.

Once all the games had finished we watched on to see the result of the other match and eventually heard the good new that it had ended in a draw. Victory at last in this brilliant tournament!

This was only the fifth time in forty eight years that Worcestershire had lifted the trophy and the first time in over a decade. What a brilliant achievement from a young squad. We have some exciting years ahead with strong minded talent coming through to replace the players that are too old. So let’s hope we can keep this winning mentality and it’s not as long a wait until we win this trophy again.

Many thanks to Worcester Golf and Country Club and their members for the use of the course over the last few days, we hope to return soon.

Ian Henry Worcestershire Boys Manager/Coach