American Matthew Essick rolled through the 2022 WCF Golf Croquet World Championship with both perseverance and strong form to claim his first world croquet championship with a 7-3, 6-7, 7-3, 7-3 finals win over England’s Robert Fulford yesterday at Sussex County Croquet Club in Brighton, UK.
The GC World Championship played out over nine days from July 30 to August 7, 2022, and Essick marched through the five-round knockout without having to face a deciding game. In fact, he was 7-0 through the quarterfinals and stretched that to an eight-game winning streak before dropping the second game in the semifinals to Australia’s Robert Fletcher, but still prevailed in the semifinal 7-4, 2-7, 7-4, 7-3 and overall was 13-2 in the knockout.
That semifinal was a tremendous display of excellent form from both players, but Essick looked like a man on a mission and he concluded that match with an epic double hoop score through H9 and H10 from an angled south boundary shot.
The other semifinal featured a legendary match-up of long-time World title rivals as Reg Bamford (ZAF) squared off against Robert Fulford. From an AC perspective, they both hold five AC World titles and Bamford had two wins in their head-to-head World AC finals matchups in 2001 and 2005. Bamford’s resume also includes GC World Titles from 2013 and 2017.
While the Essick/Fletcher four-game semifinal wrapped up in relatively rapid fashion, Bamford and Fulford went at it for more than nine hours. The match contrasted Bamford’s shot precision with Fulford’s tactical approach that effectively extended each hoop battle. It lived up to the billing as Bamford took game one 7-5, and Fulford followed with a 7-6 win to even the score.
Bamford bounced back with another 7-5 win in game three and with just one win to advance, the usual script called for Bamford to elevate his game and quickly dominate in game four. After all, he had won 15 straight games prior to the game two loss and was still +99 on hoops for the entire event.
But Fulford battled in game four and hit and extended battles and we started to see a few misses by Bamford. Fulford got the 7-6 win and we were headed to a game five. Here it seemed that Fulford finally wore Bamford down and the misses became more frequent. All of the sudden the game was out of hand for Bamford and Fulford prevailed overall 5-7, 7-6, 5-7, 7-6, 7-2.
That set the stage for a similar but even wider contrast of styles in the final as Essick’s quicker pace and spectacular shooting skills would go up against Fulford’s years of experience and masterful tactics.
Not surprisingly, Essick came out with a 7-3 win based on his strong clearing skills. And to the script in game two, Fulford found a way to extract more out of each hoop taking a 7-6 win in a game that seemed like Essick’s to win. Essick stormed back to win game three 7-3, but we started to see more failed clearances and hoop shots by both players. The Sussex County court appeared to be deadly fast and the hoops were absolutely unforgiving. Game four almost seemed to balance on how the players would be able to handle the court conditions. Essick was able to get the early lead and again despite a fair amount of missed shots by both, Fulford seemed to lose form.
Still, as they headed for hoop 10, it was 6-3. All GC players know things can rapidly change if it gets to 6-4. Essick was faced with an option to jump black with a straight on shot for the title win. If he missed, black would score and get that 6-4 result. Essick calmly stepped up and nailed the jumper for the win and brief and well-merited celebration (video above).
FULL KNOCKOUT:
https://croquetscores.com/2022/gc/14th-wcf-golf-croquet-world-championship/championship-knockout