LUGS’ final game of the year was a revival of the fixture against the current university team.
Many of the LUGS players associate Huntercombe – in Oxfordshire a little way from Henley – with their own undergraduate golf experience. Back in the 1980s, the university played its championship there as well as matches against Oxford, Cambridge and the club itself.
A Willie Park designed course, Huntercombe is ‘comfortable in its own skin’. A traditional club, even for those that hadn’t been for 40 years, the clubhouse and course felt very familiar. Two ball is the default format and to be able to play two rounds of foursomes on a weekend at a golf club in the south of England is a rare thing these days.
A grey, damp early December day was not likely to show the course at its finest. But reviews were highly complimentary with the greens, in particular, singled out for extensive praise. The friendliness of the clubhouse staff was matched only by the delicious, warm lunch served to us.
The matches were contested in the best of spirit and the university fielded a fine set of young golfers. Happily the LUGS golfers arrived with a travelling substitute so were able to lend the youngsters a player when they arrived one short. Whether the inability to field a side reflects a malaise in university golf or the attraction of midweek games against other university teams is more of a draw, is difficult to know. There is certainly enough momentum among the LUGS to entrench this fixture as a regular one; we shall see if that’s the case with the university team.
| LUGS | London University | |
| Morning | ||
| Andrew Westmore/Andrew Berryman | Anastazja Piechuta/Nicole Chrenkova | LUGS 2/1 |
| Hugh Maurice/Joe Park | Patrik Chrenko/Adrian Joly | Univ 2/1 |
| Jonathon Lavelle/Sean Dryden | Sebastiano Ruberti/Max Wietesha | LUGS 2/1 |
| James Bull/Kaihan Mobed | Anhad Singh/Neil Falconer | LUGS 3/2 |
| Afternoon | ||
| Andrew Berryman/Kaihan Mobed | Adrian Joly/Sebastiano Ruberti | LUGS 1up |
| Joe Park/Sean Dryden | Anhad Singh/Anastazja Piechuta | LUGS 4/3 |
| Andrew Westmore/James Bull | Patrik Chrenko/Nicole Chrenkova | LUGS 2/1 |
| Hugh Maurice/Jonathon Lavelle | Max Wietesha/Neil Falconer | Halved |
| LUGS beat London University 6.5-1.5 |
London University Golfing Society 