The Home Nations were hosted by the Monkstone Petanque Club. \u00a0 Eight teams from England and another eight from Scotland had come to compete for the prestigious Home Nations Championship Cup. \u00a0 With the Wales squad on home ground, the undefeated English squad were up for some fierce competition. \u00a0 The Home Nations is played in 12 rounds over two days, and is held in rotation in each of the participating nations\u2019 countries.<\/p>\n
The first day of play, saw England win seven out of their eight games, Wales take four wins and Scotland one. \u00a0 England notched another 12 wins over the next two rounds and Wales 10. \u00a0 There were further tight games in the fourth round though the next day did not see a good start for the Welsh squad who lost all their games but one against Scotland. \u00a0 As the day went on the Wales side upped their game and all of a sudden, the all-conquering English outfit were suddenly back in reach. \u00a0 Games at the end of play were England with six wins, Wales with five and Scotland with one.<\/p>\n
Round 10 scores continued to improve for Wales. \u00a0 The Welsh squad rallied at the 12th round but not enough to take the title from England, who won the Home Nations Championship with 72 wins; second was Wales with 52 wins and third was Scotland with 20.<\/p>\n
The Welsh teams, supported by team managers Barbara Vaughan and Tony Smith, fought a valiant fight but it just wasn\u2019t to be.<\/p>\n
Results: Wales 1 (Cyril Royer, Ian Bailey, Neil Dobbins) 10 games; Wales 2 (Matthew Franks, Glynn Attley, Phil Bradshaw) 9 games; Wales 3 (Jeff Ball, Dai Cannan, Mike Jacques) 5 games; Wales 4 (Derek Jones, Mike Brown, Brian Dreyer, Lynn Babbage) 6 games; Wales 5 (Julie Bailey, Gemma Foster, Tansy Mayfield) 4 games; Wales 6 (Stewart Spencer, Kon Tomczyk, Peter and Julie Beresford) 7 games; Wales 7 (Jean-Yves Robic, Jake Caston, Scott Murray) 8 games and Wales 8 (Mike Jones, John Barnes, Roger Griffin, Mike Wigg) 3 games.<\/p>\n
South Wales Echo, August 2012.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Home Nations were hosted by the Monkstone Petanque Club. \u00a0 Eight teams from England and another eight from Scotland had come to compete for the prestigious Home Nations Championship Cup. \u00a0 With the Wales squad on home ground, the undefeated English squad were up<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-competition","category-wpa"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monkstonepetanque.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monkstonepetanque.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monkstonepetanque.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monkstonepetanque.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monkstonepetanque.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=124"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.monkstonepetanque.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":128,"href":"https:\/\/www.monkstonepetanque.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124\/revisions\/128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monkstonepetanque.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monkstonepetanque.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monkstonepetanque.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}