N&EMPF 2015 Print Knockout Competition.
Two weeks ago, I started to collect the images for the N&EMPF Print Knockout Competition, held on Friday 15th May 2015 at St Mary’s Church, Wollaton.
As the selection progressed, it was looking like we may have to pass on this year’s competition, due to the loss of our image database from the club laptop. It’s quite hard to select images based on titles alone. In addition, rumor has it; we’ve lost some of our stronger members at the start of this year, denying us access to their images, but if you read on, I believe that we did ourselves very proud indeed.
Having committed us to entering, I’d had a few sleepless nights, sent out a lot of emails, at this point I will take the opportunity to extend my apologies to all those members I’ve harangued this past two weeks for images, we had our 27 images selected and we were ready to go. As I’ve stated, due to circumstance, I believed we might be entering as potential underdog, due to competition constraints and the limited images at our disposal. So my prayer was very simple; I didn’t want NOPS to be the first club out with the worst score.
Arriving at 18:45, fees paid, score sheets collected and images handed over for round 1, I sat with trepidation and a lot of anticipation. Of the 47 clubs listed in N&EMPF, 11 had entered: –
Beeston CC, Bolsover CC, Chesterfield PS, Clay Cross PS, Ilkeston 2000 CC, Long Eaton CC, Newark & District PS, Nottingham & Notts. PS, Peterborough PS,
Rolls Royce (Derby) PS and Nottingham Outlaws PS
For those, like me, that have never been to this type of competition, it’s very different to club competitions. Scoring is done via three judges, using electronic score pads, scoring between 2 to 5, for each print displayed. They get about 10 seconds t choose so the pace is brisk. A fourth official calls out the titles and a fifth announces the collective scores.
At the end of the first round, the top scoring eight clubs were going through to round 2. NOPS has scored 139, with no image scoring less than 10 from our first 12 images. The results came quickly and my prayer had been answered. Out went Long Eaton CC with 119, Bolsover CC with 134 and Clay Cross CC with 134 and at this point we were scoring higher than Ilkeston 2000 CC who’d scored 136. We had made round 2.
Round 2 needed 15 images, so we carried our 6 strongest images from round 1 forward and replaced the rest. During round 2 we had 1 image scored at 9, our only low score of the competition, and 1 scored 15, our highest of the night.
With round 2 completed and the scores in the end results were: –
Joint 7th: – Ilkeston 2000 CC & NOPS scoring 184 points
6th Chesterfield PS scoring 186 points
5th Peterborough PS Scoring 190 points
4th Newark & District PS scoring 192 points
3rd Nottingham & Notts PS scoring 193 points
2nd Beeston CC scoring 201 points
1st Rolls Royce (Derby) PS scoring 207 points
The N&EMPF Print Trophy went to Rolls Royce (Derby) PS, with them and Beeston CC going forward to represent N&EMPF in the PAGB competition at the end of the year.
Our top images were provided by Bob Richards with “Big Sister” scoring 15 points and “Red Cleopatra” scoring 14 points both in round 2.
Clearly I’d under estimated our chances at the start, and I was evidently over the moon when I left, with reaching round 2 and better still, being within 23 points of our major rivals, who all who have a much larger membership and therefore image selection pool to work from. It’s evident that what we lacked in quantity, we made up for in quality.
THANK YOU to all NOPS members, you can and should be justifiably proud of YOUR achievement here. We are small, but without doubt a force to contend with.
A full score list and a slideshow of images is below.
George Reilly
Click to download 2015 N&EMPF score sheet
