Greetings from Melbourne! Today was a fun day at the Victorian Croquet center as the doubles portion of the Ramsis Cup was completed. It was great to reconnect with players from all over. The Ramsis Cup originally began as a match between Egypt and a Rest of the World (RoW) and has been played twice previously in 2008 and 2016. Both have been won by the RoW by a narrow margin of 11 matches to 10.
Read MoreMorning Coffee: GC Worlds Take Center Stage
The three-segment 2017 edition of the WCF Golf Croquet Championships is now well under-way in Cairnlea, Melbourne, Australia with the Under-21 GC World Championship now down to eight players. Here's an update on Day 3 from the Croquet New Zealand Facebook page:
Read More2017 Croquet Mallet Directory
Congratulations to Brass Spot Mallets and Marcelino Piquero for taking top spot in the 2017 Annual Croquet Network Mallet Poll. Brass Spot notched 167 votes in a poll that set a new record with 454 total votes. For players though, the good news is the number of mallet makers has now grown to 27 which is up four from 2016.
Read MoreMorning Coffee: European Masters
As posted on the Nottingham List, the schedule for the 2017 European Masters Series is starting to come together. The season long tournament series awards points for performance in both AC and Golf Croquet tournaments in Europe. More information can be found on the European Masters website. Here is the schedule to date:
Read MoreMorning Coffee: A Croquet Documentary
On the scene this week is a promo video for a modest GoFundMe campaign by George Saad and Zak Jambor to raise $6,000 to produce a documentary on croquet called To Find True Pleasure. You can read about the full project on their site www.tofindcroquet.com.
Read More2017 MacRobertson Shield Statistical Preview: Part 2
In anticipation of the upcoming MacRobertson Shield Tier 1 World Team Championship between Australia, England, New Zealand and the United States this coming April, this is the second of a three-part statistical look at the team line-ups. This week we'll focus on a pair of charts on Tripling Percentage by Games Played and Wins and follow with two charts based on Dynamic Grade and World Rank. As a note, this week's charts do include Chris Shilling in place of Paul Skinley for team New Zealand as that line-up switch was announced this week. All statistics are sourced from croquetrecords.com.
Read MoreMorning Coffee: The Inevitable Mar-a-Lago Trump Backlash
The inevitable Mar-a-Lago Trump croquet backlash has officially kicked off. Cue the fireworks and congratulations to the Miami Herald and Carl Hiaasen as first out of the gate. In fact, he gave croquet first mention in his brilliantly circular fake news/non-fake news posting:
Read More2017 MacRobertson Shield Statistical Preview: Part 1
With the recent announcement of all four rosters for the 2017 MacRobertson Shield to be held in Rancho Mirage, California, in April and early May, we can now take a snapshot look at how the rosters stack up from a statistical perspective. I am going to present this in three separate postings starting with today's look at individual stats. The future postings will include a Trendline Player Rank look and a Cumulative Team Stats Analysis.
For the tables below, I'll offer some comments on items that caught my eye, but it's primarily from a statistical look as I rarely get to watch even the US players and have no in-person experience watching players from the other three teams. I would encourage anyone with more insight to fill up the comments section with feedback.
WCF Golf Croquet WC Makes First Visit to Australia
Come along and see the game of croquet played at its absolute finest when the World Croquet Federation’s Golf Croquet World Championships come to Australia for the first time at the end of February.
Around 80 players from 14 countries will converge in Melbourne from February 25 to March 5, 2017 for the 12th World Championships, which are held every two years in a nominated country and attract the best names in the sport.
Morning Coffee: US Announces MacRob Roster?
There was certainly a bit of drama in the long wait for the US MacRobertson Shield roster line-up. I was sort of expecting a Livestream press conference with fireworks, cheerleaders and some AC/DC. Alas, the roster quietly appeared on the Americas forum on Croquet World Online. The report there names Jeff Soo, Ben Rothman, Danny Huneycutt, David Maloof, Matthew Essick
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