Challenge Match - Penicuik vs Tweed Valley

Our petanque club received a challenge from Tweed Valley PC and we hosted them on Sunday 7th July - the same day as Andy Murray would try and win Wimbledon... bad timing or what!?

In the end, with the help of 3 players which we pinched from Tweed Valley, we won the match 8 games to 1 and we all managed to catch the final set of Andy Murray's match too! Result.

I have been practicing shooting mercilessly all summer (the weather has been very kind to us) and I will often spend an hour or two in the evenings shooting - setting up game situations and trying to test myself with tricky shoots (over the tops, directly behind the jack, side-by-side, double take outs etc).  There is some definite progress but practice is all very well, it's more important to be able to do it in the pressure of a tough game.  I have had to abandon a few evening sessions when the midges were biting - keep forgetting the repellent!

Our piste is very much a shooters piste (which is the way it was supposed to be).  Pointers find it tricky as it is quite unpredictable - shooters of course are not worried about these things! The surface now has a number of humps and bumps which are inevitable as it beds in.  It was laid and compacted in the snow in March and so was totally soaked at installation. Now it has been baked the base is rock hard and the top dressing floats on it in a very pleasing way.  In the barer parts it is almost impossible to draw a circle on the ground and so we often use plastic circles instead.  I think all our players like the surface - I certainly feel it will make them better players as there are only a few genuinely challenging pistes in Scotland.  I am looking forward to welcoming players from all over Scotland to Penicuik for the Scottish Triples on 1st September.

Next up for me is the Scottish Singles & Shooting on 27th July and my defence of the Scottish Pairs on 28th July.  Being both an organiser and a player in SPA competitions has its problems - lack of the ability to warm up being the biggest.  I have never been good at singles play, it can expose any weakness quite easily and singles competitions always seem to coincide with 'a bad day'.  Maybe that will change this year...