Melbourn lost 12-14

The scoring system for team Squash used in most County Leagues is interesting. Points are not awarded for strings won, but rather for individual games within a string. So a 3-2 scoreline scores 3 points for the winner’s team and 2 for the beaten player’s side. That means the most a team can score on an evening is 15 points. To round this up a further 5 bonus points are added for winning the majority of the strings… however many strings one actually won.

It needs to be this way because otherwise there is a situation where one team wins three strings 3-2, so gains 9 points and the opponents 6 from those, whilst the other team wins two strings 3-0, so 6-0 in their favour. Add those together without any bonus points and it makes the final score 12-9… not to the winning side.

If there was a bonus point per string won that would turn a 3-0 string into 4-0 and a 3-2 string into 4-2. Which, in turn, would change the 9-12 final score into… 12-14, once again with the side that only won two strings getting the majority of the points! However a flat 5 point bonus for winning the majority of the strings, no matter how big that majority is (i.e. 3-2, 4-1 and 5-0 all score 5) means a team that wins three strings 3-2 and loses two strings 0-3 ends up with 14 points to their opponents 12.

But this is all just theoretical – it never happens in practice, right? Well… here it did. And sadly it was the 1sts who were on the wrong end of it: Chris and Matt both winning 3-0, with Vinod, Mike and Mark all going down 2-3. There were many #SoClose moments; Vinod being edged out 15-13 in a deciding game tie-break after recovering from 0-2 down, Mike being 2-0 up and into a tie-break in the third before it turned on him, and Mark praying for victory (see photos)… but ultimately it was the Uni’s night.

Chris Shaw (1) bt Anant Gupta 11-4, 11-6, 11-6

Matt Sampson (2) bt Jack Murzynowski 11-8, 11-8, 11-3

Vinod Duraikan (3) l to Jack Newey 5-11, 8-11, 11-9, 11-8, 13-15

Mike Herd (4) l to Neil Prabhu 11-6, 11-3, 10-12, 6-11, 9-11

Mark Oppen (5) l to Alex Glover 6-11, 11-1, 11-5, 5-11, 9-11