Papers for 2010 Annual Meeting

Published 13 July 2010

MCCU County Team Competition Report

Julie Johnson

It is interesting that the architects of the new grading bands adopted this season, the SCCU, have concluded that the new bands have not directly replaced the old, which was their stated intention. As I tend to agree, I feel it is not appropriate to make direct comparisons in some areas between last season and this. Despite the increase in the number of sections from 5 to 6 we had a net loss in teams from 30 to 29. None of the graded sections had sufficient teams to warrant zoning and only Warwickshire entered the U100, despite extending the deadline for entries for this section. Two matches were conceded this season compared to one last, although the Lincs U140 team withdrew after conceding some of its matches. The number of defaulted boards also increased, although much of the increase was due to 1 team who were unable to field a full team in all but one match. The defaults were a mixture of odd boards here and there and multiple defaults of 2-4 boards by the lowest team being run by a county.

Links opening in new windows for full MCCU results in the 2009-2010: Open, Minor, U180, U160, U140, U120 Warwickshire were nominated for U100 ECF stages as the only MCCU entrant.

In the Open section the qualifying places for the National stages led to some recapping of the rules. Those published on the website and issued to captains failed to reflect a change agreed at a past AGM, something several of us managed to overlook 2 or 3 years ago when trying to update the rules as they appeared on the website. The current rules appear to correctly reflect automatic promotionand relegation between the two Open sections, but somewhere along the line the actual practice has changed with counties applying for upper or lower section according to their preference. Hence the agenda item to clarify the way forward on this.

The U160 section had me nearly reaching for the slide rule, I don’t recall such a close finish in the section for many a year. Going into the last match many assumed that Leics would beat Warks to take top spot, but they almost conspired to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by losing. As I awaited the various last results I had to tell enquiring captains that I was unable to say who would finish 1,2,3 until all the results were known.