BPL Cup Wrap Up 2021
Belrose hosted a Preliminary round of the BPL Cup today. We had perfect weather and a top field of 9 teams from Belrose, Mona Vale, West Pymble, Willoughby Park, St Ives and North Sydney.
The BPL Cup was established by BA to bring the format of the highly successful Bowls Premier League event directly to Clubs in the form of a nationwide pathway competition for grass roots player. The competition progresses through Preliminary Rounds, Regional Finals and State/Territory Finals culminating with the National Finals, staged during the Bowls Premier League at Club Pine Rivers in November 2021. The matches were a two bowl triples format consisting of two sets of five ends with a one end tie-breaker if the sets are evenly split.
In the morning we played a Round Robin format with three Sections of three teams. With the 5 end sets it was truly ‘sudden death’ and the general feedback from the players was that it was an exciting and fun format. Many of the players expressed interest in introducing the format into their club’s social bowls occasionally.
The 3 section winners were Steve Rawlings, Tony Taylor and Graham Hartmann, all from Belrose. The 4th team in the knock-out final after lunch was the Alan McMaster team from West Pymble who just got in ahead of Kenta Treacher (North Sydney) and Matt Harris (Mona Vale) by 0.5 set points due to a drawn set in the morning. It was a very tight competition.
In the end, the 2 teams going through to the Regional Play-offs later this year are the Tony Taylor team from Belrose and the Alan McMaster team from West Pymble. Full results and details are available HERE.
Congratulations to all the players, we hope to hold the event again next year.