No luck for youngsters in National competitions
14 May 2007
No luck this year at the National competitions for Juniors and Espoirs (18-22 years olds) for Hartley brothers Luke and Charles Fribbens. Despite having a clutch of British and English national titles between them, this year's competitions were not to add to their trophy collection.
Charles, currently an English national junior champion, was playing in his first British Junior Triples competition with his regular team-mates of Robert Cooter, Alex Bruce and Philip Jarrett. The competition was a five round Swiss format but the draw pitted them against their Inter-Regional rivals from the Northern Region. Recent games between these boys from the Manchester area have generally gone the Kent team's way but have always been close. But the Kent team were slow starters at the excellent facilities at Crondall in Hampshire and the Northern team ran out easy winners 13-6. The boys then stayed asleep for the next round to lose to 5 points. After lunch, they started to play in the way that won them the EPA title in the Isle of Wight last year, which is to say, conclusively. They only dropped 8 points in the three games in the afternoon. But it was all too late by then and the lads came 5th, with 3 wins, and a BHN of 11. The winning team was the team that Alex, Rob, Charles and Phil beat at the Isle of Wight, the Southern team of Charlotte Dennis, Helen Manley and Stuart Floyd. They ended with 5 wins out of 5 but, as this was a Swiss system, they did not play our boys. The Northern team of Richard Marston, Jack Barrington and Andrew Willis came second with 4 wins.
In the older age group, Luke teamed up with Tovil brothers, Dean and Scott Ashby. Again, they had a slow start in a seven round Round-Robin. Afternoon scores again improved and they were in contention with the last round to play. However, the format of seven rounds with all games starting together meant that the last games were starting very late. Some players were planning to go to the Grand Prix the next day and those teams out of contention were not really interested in playing the last round so it became a bit disrupted. Luke, Scott and Dean ended up 4th with 3 wins out of 6 games played (+1 point). The winners included one of Luke's ex-GB team-mates, Kris Smith (Plough and Chequers) who teamed up with recent GB representative Dean Seville and Christopher Gidlow who won 5 out of 6 rounds.
Luke will get another chance at the Espoirs next year but Charles will have to set his junior sights on EPA or BPF doubles titles in this his last year as a junior.
Report Martyn Fribbens