Durham bottom despite Tarren
Jun 1 2009 by Tim Taylor, The Journal
HAVING won the Northern Counties League as recently as 2006, Northumberland always consider themselves a genuine title threat once they get all their big guns back from American colleges.
But that hung in the balance for a while against Durham at Ponteland. It was 7-7 with four of the singles to go and whoever blinked was heading for defeat in both their first two matches of the season. So the loser of the derby match is now more likely to be concerned with avoiding bottom spot in a six-county league.
Northumberland’s Ben Taylor, Andrew Minnikin, Nicky Maddison and Kris Gray all won the decisive singles to lift their team to third and leave Durham marooned at the bottom.
Maddison had to miss the previous week’s county strokeplay championship at Newbiggin because of college commitments in Kansas, where three wins and three more top ten places in his conference placed him in the Ping Collegiate All American Top Five.
The Northumberland No 1, Mark Penny, had been another absentee as he tied down a respectable 15th place finish in the National Collegiate Junior Tournament in Alabama.
On Saturday, Penny played Callum Tarren in the No 1 singles, in what, on paper, should have been an epic. Penny won both the county strokeplay and matchplay titles last season. At 18, Tarren is Durham’s youngest No 1 since Graeme Storm, holds both county crowns and has been awarded a scholarship at the Radford College in Virginia, which he will begin at the end of August.
