Last week we held our annual Burstwick Cup which is a Ryder Cup style event where two teams (America and Europe) face each other in a two day competition to see which team will be crowned victorious! The format of the event is Fourball Batterball matches on Saturday and Individual matches on the Sunday. A win in your match gets one point for your team and a halved match gets 0.5 each.

As always, it is a very popular event and this year we had 36 players taking part and the captains of each team (John Ward Europe and Martin Gill USA) strategically picked their best players to go against their opponents and fight the good fight!

After a very one-sided event last year the club hoped for a closer competition this year, and boy did they get that! Captain John Ward was very happy with his team on Saturday as their edged their way to a 5-4 lead, but with another 18 available on Sunday it was still definitely all to play for!

On Sunday European Captain John Ward beat his compatriot to give their team a two shot lead and a big morale boost for the rest of the players. The next two matches went USA’s way and suddenly both teams were jostling for the lead.

USA then took a 5 point lead with a plethora of wins but shortly after Europe brought it right back! It then ended up going down to the final finishing match after the score was 12.5-13.5. The last two matches had already finished with big wins either way so it was down to the third to last match to finish on 18 and decide the event, and in the end the match between Paul Evans and David Kinnear finished all square to give USA the one point victory (don’t worry Paul we won’t mention the fun in the bunker on 18!).

Well done to Martin and his team on beating the competition by a hair, after personally not scoring a single point for the team it just shows that the outfit was very poignant - you definitely needed those players!!

Thanks to everyone for supporting this fantastic event as usual, and well done to all of the winning team!