Block play is underway! Sherif Abdelwahab had a good day with two wins over Charlie Sharpe of Australia and Evan Newel of Ireland. Mohammad Kamal also won one of his two matches with a solid win over Mostafa Eissa of Egypt. Matt Griffith came up against the number one and two ranked players in his block and I'm sure didn't go down without a fight.
Read MoreBromley: GCWC Opening Ceremony Journal #02
We are ready to go! Here are a few team shots taken at the Opening Ceremony today. Today was a practice day for everyone followed by the players' meeting, Opening Ceremonies and reception. Tomorrow is the Main Event and each of us will head to our respective venues to begin our block play matches. Go USA!
Read MoreBromley: GC World Championship Journal #01
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.