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The Self-Preservation Priority

Crikey! How a season can change! The start of Surrey’s Inter County Division 1 campaign of 2006/7 saw us stride confidently into battle like some darting Arnold Schwarzenegger, brushing aside opponents & genuinely considering promotion to the Premier a possibility.

However, somewhere along the line we collectively turned into Mr Bean, with chaos and confusion ensuing at every turn, the most recent of which was a cruel 11-1 drubbing of our Mens A at the hands of the ‘Los Galacticos’ of Cheshire. The 24-12 defeat in this most recent encounter leaves Surrey teetering a mere 3 points from the brink of relegation to Division 2, otherwise known as “The Division of wailing and gnashing of teeth and long journeys and high travel costs”!

A resounding win for Sussex has given them a great opportunity of avoiding the drop and makes for a very interesting nail-biter of a final weekend, not that we at Surrey wouldn’t prefer a nice safe mundane one instead.

I suppose the writing was on the wall from the off at Rudheath Social Club as Surrey’s Ladies B team lost all of the first 4 points of the weekend. A late rally saw Penny Lambert (16.10) win on her County debut followed by a Lady of the Match win from Helen Cullip (17.28).

The Mens B fared slightly better, managing a 6-6 draw with Ronnie Godbeer (28.36) taking Man of the Match, backed up by a great performance from youngster Dave Webb (28.05) and another Surrey debut winner in Steve Greenough (25.42)

Another Lady of the Match for Apylee Jones (21.72) sealed a 3-3 draw for the Ladies A after good wins from Chrissy Skehan (17.24) & Mel Henry (19.48), and the outlook was comfortable with Surrey lagging by just a couple of points. But the Cheshire Mens A is by no means an ordinary side & seeing the names coming out of the draw for our opponents left no-one in any doubt that this was going to be a tough task.

However, the ferocity of Cheshire’s onslaught was still a shock as they piled in with three 30+ averages, a 29 and a couple of 28s just for good measure! When the carnage was complete, Aaron Turner (28.36) emerged as the only Surrey success and, with news coming through of Sussex’s goring of Gwent, it was clear that our Final fixture of the season against Bucks is going to require a lot of determination and will certainly have to be disaster-free!

So here we are, Surrey’s very own ‘Self-Preservation Society’, balancing right on the edge of the drop like Charlie Croker and the gang at the end of “The Italian Job”, but hang on lads, I’ve got a great idea … err.

Celebrity Darts?

Following a tip-off from those nice chaps at Middlesex, the Saturday night at Cheshire saw the Surrey contingent residing in one of the DeVere chain of luxurious hotels. With Manchester United being shown live on Sky on the Sunday, our players found themselves sharing the breakfast room with the likes of Sky Sports presenter Richard Keys and ex-player Ruud Gullit. News of the star guests had reached Cheshire’s venue on Saturday afternoon, well before the teams’ arrival at the hotel, and there was a buzz around the room at the thought of rubbing shoulders with celebrity. Not all were so star-struck though, as Tadworth based Surrey player Julie Austin, on being told that Jamie Redknapp was staying at the hotel, replied “I don’t know him, does he play in the Mens A?”. I am reliably informed that disruption to the players on stage was minimal despite the loud hilarity that ensued.

Autobahn Aggro

Regular readers of this column may remember reading here about five years ago of the time when Jimmy Mann wandered the streets of Barnsley for an hour in search of the Surrey hotel, when it was just 250 yards away. Jimmy has, of course, moved on since those days as his PDC exploits show, but it seems that he is still beset by navigational problems … it’s just that nowadays the locations are more far-flung!

Travelling by car to the PDPA Players Championship in Bad Soden, Germany, Jimmy & travelling partner, Ben Burton, entrusted the directions to their SatNav and set off. Unfortunately, the SatNav wasn’t to be trusted after all and they ended up in a small town by the same name which was over an hour’s drive from where they were supposed to be! Thinking they would miss the registration time, they hot-footed it to the other Bad Soden and, thanks to Dutch TV, just managed to register in time as the event had been delayed by 2 hours to fit in with TV scheduling.

Ben & Jimmy were understandably very relieved at the time change, especially Jimmy, as after all that hassle, he would have hated to have missed out on the pleasure of his swift 3-0 defeat to Michael van Gerwen in the first round!

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