National Triples Tournament

Another late summer weekend, another pétanque tournament. The National Triples tournament started out dry, with the rain falling somewhere else to give us a little rainbow. I partnered again with club mates John T and Christophe.

But the forecast was accurate, and we had a shocking downpour around lunchtime on Saturday. A few hardy souls got out with rakes and shovels to dry out the grounds as much as possible and we resumed.

At one point in the qualifying rounds we were ranked as high as 8th out of the 28 teams, but we lost a game we shouldn’t have and slipped back down.

By the end of pool play we were 17th, top of the third group of 8. We then had quarterfinal, semifinal and finals games against the rest of that group.

We hung on to win the division, which yielded us a tiny little trophy. Given our base skill level, relative lack of experience as a team, and lax practice habits, that was a good result.

One of the highlights for me was to meet this guy, Andre Deramond, who is one of only a few internationally qualified pétanque umpires in this part of the world. He was over from Australia for the week doing some umpire training and helped officiate the tournament. We chatted a bit (any excuse to practice my rusty French!) during the tournament and he even gave me my first yellow card warning. I made a relatively obscure mistake (which didn’t make a difference to the outcome) which he happened to see. He gave me a warning and explained the rule and that would have been the end of it. But the guys on the next lane over saw me getting away with only a warning and put up a joking fuss, so I got the full over-dramatic yellow card treatment. All in good fun… a single yellow card doesn’t carry any penalty. There was much laughing and back-slapping between our team, who are more social players, and the other guys, who take their shot at a national championship a lot more seriously.