Somehow I doubt he would handle it quite as calmly as the gentlemen in Division I of the Island badminton league – for they have been faced with a similar scenario.
At the end of the first half of the league programme (the season is divided into two sections, with the second starting this month), the winners were announced as the Island’s top pair, Gavin Carter and Clive Dunford.
But an error was made in the way the tables were calculated – and it has since been discovered that David Luce and Peter Blandin, who were thought to have finished second, did, in fact, finish top.
Andrew Taylor, who organises the leagues and is responsible for sorting out the tables, explained: ‘It should have been calculated on the number of matches won, but I worked it out on points won.
Unfortunately I misunderstood the rules and put Gavin and Clive top.’ The confusion arose because the way the figures are calculated has been changed recently, but Taylor said he explained the situation to Carter and Dunford ‘very nicely and politely’, and they accepted the situation ‘like the gentlemen they are.’ Carter said: ‘To be honest, we play the league matches on top of all the training we do for the Island squad, and matches can be difficult.
But we play in the league for fun and don’t take it too seriously.
This won’t stop us turning up to play, we’re not in a huff about it! We’ll just have to make sure we beat them in this half of the season.’ Luce and Blandin hadn’t even realised that they were the table-toppers last season, so it came as ‘quite a shock – but a very nice one’, according to Blandin, that they had beaten the top pair.
‘We don’t keep count.
Win or lose we play for the enjoyment – but we’re quite chuffed to get the win! If the results had gone as they should have, Gavin and Clive should have thrashed us! Luce is a member of the Island squad and will be playing for Jersey in the County competition in Sussex at the weekend.
Currently in training for the forthcoming NatWest Island Games, he and Blandin have been playing doubles for the last four years.
‘There are a couple of county pairs in the league, so we shouldn’t have won it really, on paper.
I was very shocked!’ he admitted.
The second half of the season of men’s doubles gets under way next week, and both pairs will be vying for the top spot because, although medals are awarded for both the pre- and post-Christmas sessions, it is only the winners of the respective divisions at the end of the second session who are ultimately crowned champions.
