Premier blues for island's top women

KAY CHIVERS has stressed the benefits of Guernsey's women playing in the British League despite their tough baptism in the Premier Blue division. The Sarnian team of Chivers, Dawn Morgan and Sam Kershaw travelled to Cheltenham to play the first five matches of their inaugural national campaign over two days of high-quality competition.

Many of their opponents were ranked in the top 50 in the country.

But although Guernsey lost all of their overall matches (made up of six individual ties with each team member playing twice), there were some individual victories and the players see the competition as extremely valuable.

'It was a very good weekend and a very worthwhile experience. It is a good competition to go into for us,' said Chivers, who won two of her 12 matches and went to deciding sets in several others.

'As time went on, we got better and generally it went well. We won some matches and four or five other matches went to five sets, which we just lost out in. But if we had won the overall score could have been 3-3 rather than 5-1.

'It is a fairly strong division to be put in straight away, but they did not know what we would be like. We go away again in January when the bottom three teams in Premier Red and Premier Blue clash, so the standard would be more or less the same as it was this time.

'We would probably then drop down to the first division for next season,' she added.

Over their opening weekend of British League action, Guernsey suffered 6-0 defeats at the hands of Irish Ladies I and Chippenham TTC, while they lost 5-1 to Grove II, Batts Peniel Team and Wirral Ladies.

The match against the latter turned out to be the closest, with Morgan claiming a 3-2 victory over Clare Langford, while she and Chivers (twice) were edged out 3-2 in their other games.

Although Kershaw did not win any of her games, she did contribute to Guernsey's 'sets-for' column in the table.

'The games were a lot faster than we are used to, the ball comes at you much faster and those players use different serves, but we are not out of our league and it can only help our game playing against them.