'Awesome' effort to reach top

GUERNSEY will be playing in the National Club League Division One next year. The Sarnians completed their Division Two South campaign with a 100% winning record thanks to a 5-1 victory away to Salisbury and captain Chris Hickling was delighted to have secured promotion to the top flight.

'It has been an awesome effort and next year is just going to be phenomenal,' he said.

'Division One is so much tougher. Two or three players who play for clubs in it are playing at Wimbledon this week, such as Alex Bogdanovic.

'I think the highest rated player we have faced this year was a 1.5, which is very good, but next year we will be dealing with guys who are 1.2 or 1.3. The guys at number one in Division One teams are going to be near the top 10 English players.

'It is going to be a great experience and good for the juniors as well to get to play at that level,' Hickling added.

The captain even admitted that he did not believe before the start of the season his side would have done so well, but that is hardly surprising considering Guernsey had not won a match before at this level.

He put the success down to a real team effort and a renewed enthusiasm within the squad.

'We have never had the keenness before that we had this year and we have had strength all through the team,' said Hickling.

'We have had eight players wanting to play every week and coming to practise. Everyone has just been so eager to play that it has translated itself on court.

'In other years the games have been close, but it is quite amazing that we managed to pull off the wins that we did this year.

'There was not one match where we did not fight to the end.'

Despite the four-point winning margin in the final match in Salisbury, the Sarnians were again made to work hard for their victory.

At number one Pete Theron had an excellent win against a higher-ranked opponent in Tom Williams, who was a top UK under-18 player, taking the deciding set 6-1.

Both Rob West and the captain had fairly comfortable straight-sets singles victories with the one dropped rubber being at number three where Patrick Ogier lost out to crafty older player Nigel Watts.

The two doubles matches were marathon affairs but the Guernsey pairings showed their determination to claim both rubbers.

West and Ian Robinson came through to take the decider 6-4 while Theron and Hickling came from 5-1 down in the second set tie-breaker to win 7-5, 7-6.