Two days of high-class international women's fastpitch competion will be on show over the weekend of June 2-3
when the annual London Cup Tournament takes place at Richings Park Sports Club, Wellesley Avenue, Richings Park, Iver, Bucks SL0 9BN, hosted by the Great Britain Fastpitch League and GB Softball.
It's a tournament well worth coming to see – and Richings Park is a great place to be a softball spectator, with the three competition pitches adjacent to each other and to the clubhouse facilities, where good food and drink will be available all day.
Tough competition
Six teams will compete to win the 2012 London Cup – two from Britain and four from abroad.
The British teams will be the London Angels, our perennial representatives in European club competition, and the GB Under-19 Women, who will be warming up for European Championships (and World Championship Qualifiers) in July in The Netherlands.
This will be the only competitive action that the GB Under-19 players
will have as a team before the European Championships, and Head Coach Liz Knight and Assistant Coach Robbie Robison will be keen to use the opportunity to work on defensive and offensive strategies.
One new player joining the Under-19s for the first time at the London Cup will be outfielder Christine Findlay, the daughter of former GB Slowpitch and Men's Fastpitch player and BSF Hall of Fame member Shaun Findlay. The family now lives in South Africa, where Christine was scouted over the winter by GB Women's Team Head Coach Hayley Scott.
The opposition for the Angels and the GB Under-19s will be the Danish National Women's Team, a club team from Switzerland called the Barracudas, a club team from France called Thiais and a US naval team based in Rota, near Cadiz in southern Spain.
Schedule
The action will get under way at 9.30 am on Saturday, June 2 when the Angels and the GB Under-19s will play each other, while the US navy team from Spain will take on the Danish National Team.
Round-robin play will continue throughout Saturday and will finish with the first round of games on Sunday morning. Then the top four teams will move to a Page Playoff to determine the winner, with the final scheduled for 3.15 pm on Sunday.
Three additional games will be played on Saturday, as the Danish, Spanish and French teams have agreed to play exhibition games against the GB Under-19 Men's Team to give the GB players some competitive experience in a non-European Championship year.
For the GB National Teams programme, the London Cup is a vital chance to provide competition experience for teams and players without the cost of having to travel overseas.
London Cup history
The London Cup began as far back as 2002 as an annual international women's fastpitch tournament organised by the GB National Teams programme, and it continued for five years, through 2006, with the quality of competition increasing every year.
While two editions of the tournament were actually played in London – in 2002 at Barn Elms and in 2006 in Croydon, the three in between were played at venues far from the capital, in Banbury, RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire and Cobham in Surrey.
The 2006 London Cup at Croydon marked perhaps the only time that virtually the full GB Women's Team, including most of the squad's overseas-based players, came together to play a tournament on British soil. And it was the only time that a GB Team has won the competition, against tough opposition that included two American teams and teams from the Czech Republic, France, Greece and Spain.
Nevertheless, despite the presence of overseas-based GB Women players including legendary pitcher Stacie Townsend, that 2006 London Cup was dominated by British-based Hall of Fame outfielder Laura Thompson, who hit .714 for the tournament, stole innumerable bases and drove in the winning run in the final against US opposition.
The tournament, a particular favourite of teams from the Czech Republic, was abandoned after 2006 due to cost, but was revived in 2011 with financial support from the BSF, which is providing funding again this year to allow the tournament to take place.
Raising the standard even further this year will be the volunteer presence of ESF and ISF-qualified umpires from Canada, Belgium and the Czech Republic.