Auckland trounced Wellington in this year’s Chanticleer Cup challenge.

That’s my triples team, with my frequent partner Thierry and Linda who leads the Tauranga club.

Because the tournament is specifically designed for up and coming players to get some experience, and always involves finding one squad who are willing and able to travel, getting the two squads to be perfectly competitive is a challenge. This year, we were just much stronger.

We had some good games, good learning experiences. I won 8 out of 9 games. The one loss was just a terrible game and over quite quickly… we never got started.

The best game was our last one, triples, with us as the top seeded Auckland team against Wellington’s top team. We started poorly, and found ourselves down by something like 1-8 (game goes to 13). We rallied and eventually got to 10-11. I had the final two balls of the round, we were holding two points. All I had to do was roll one more ball in for us to win. Instead, I managed to knock one of the opposing balls into position!

I now find a way to give credit to President Trump: it is not so easy to solve a problem of your own making. You make a boneheaded mistake, and suddenly things are much worse than they were before. What can you do? In this case, I took a deep breath and shot the offending ball right out of bounds. We were back to where we were before I stepped up. I was an idiot and a hero within three minutes.

We secured our final point on the next round.

Even though we’d already sewn up the Cup by that point, going on to win that last game was the most satisfying part of the weekend. It’s mostly a mental game, and pressure is an enemy to be overcome. So, finding myself in that situation, and still nailing the shot, was an extra good bit of training. Hopefully I can remember how I did it!