Melbourn lost 17-8

The 1sts suffered an extremely narrow defeat yet again as they concluded the opening half of the Cambridgeshire League Division 1 season with an 8-17 defeat at Cambridge University 1sts.
As with a number of other matches this season Melbourn were beaten by three strings to two, with at least one of the strings breaking the wrong way from their perspective after going all the way to the fifth game. In this match it was Miles Jeanneret (4) who suffered that fate, in his case not just losing his fifth game but seeing it disappear after an extended tie-break finally ended 15-13 in favour of Ellie White instead.
In the other strings the students won at the top and bottom as Matt Sampson (1) and Mark Oppen (5) both fell 3-0 to Benjamin Adams and Patrick Foley respectively. The middle strings went Melbourn’s way, Chris Shaw (2) recovering from a 2-1 deficit to beat Matthew Wong 3-2 and Vinod Duraikan (3) grinding his opponent down to win 3-1 going away from Ralphie Reeves, Vinod winning his third and fourth games 11-4, 11-2.
The 1sts sit eighth of the ten teams in Division 1 at the mid-season break.