St Albans Croquet Club

2024 Charity One-ball competition in aid of British Heart Foundation

​

We held a heat of the Croquet Association’s Charity One-ball Competition on Saturday 6th April 2024.  Whilst this is a national competition (and there’s an opportunity to go to a national final), it was really a chance to get people together at the start of the season, raise some money for charity and have a fun day.  Tea/coffee and cake was involved, and we even got some specatators!

​

One ball is an easy game to learn designed to be played by players of both Association Croquet and Golf Croquet, with each game taking about 30 minutes.  There are more details in the One-ball section at the bottom of the resources page.

​

Eight people entered the competition with two blocks of four being played on the half-lawns.  Heather dominated the first block winning all her games, with David coming second winning his other two games.  In the other block, Roger won all his games, but Stephen, Vicki and Ross all won one game leading to a tie-break to see who would go through in second.  A Hoffman tie-break was used to separate them (think of it as a croquet penalty shoot-out).  At the end of 4 shots, Stephen and Vicki were level and moved into 'sudden death', Vicki duly ran hoop 1 from the boundary and progressed to the semi-finals.

​

The semi-finals were Roger vs David and Heather vs Vicki, and most people expected Roger, and Heather to progress to the final, but David and Vicki both used their bisques to pull out a lead and maintained it to the peg to progress to the final. 

​

As David and Vicki had the same handicap the final involved no bisques.  David gained an early lead and maintained it to win the competition.  In the 3rd/4th play off Heather had the lead and ran rover first, but Roger used his last bisque to run penult and rover before pegging out to take 3rd place.

​

Tables and photos below.

​

Block Results