03 Dec 2009 at 06:22 | Published by:  | Views: 8170 | News search  | source: F.I.G.S.P.

The cold winter is coming also in Italy, so the indoor season in Vedano al Lambro (actually the only Italian indoor course, Bongni 100%) has started.
The first tournament of the season had been the "Master Final" a match-play tournament reserve to the best players of the season.
Later in the winter, Vedano course will host an international tournament on 12th-13th Dec., the "12 hours pair marathon" on 24th Jan. and in the end the "U-23 international challenge" on 6th-7th Mar.

Back to the "Master Final", the tournament has been played on 2 days.
The first day, 5 qualification rounds based on stroke-system. 48 men players and 10 ladies players tried to get the cut to qualify for the final matchplay day.
The best 4 men and 2 ladies from the qualification rounds were directly placed in 1/4 finals (men) and 1/2 finals (ladies). Men ranked from 5th to 20th place and ladies ranked from 3rd to 6th place got the access to a "repeschage" round to reach 1/4 finals men and 1/2 finals ladies.

The tournament level had been very high with lots of "blue" scores (a total of 21 rounds scored 22, 23, 24 ).

In the men category, it was a very close fight to reach the top 4 places which granted the direct access to 1/4 finals. At the end of 5 rounds there have been 5 players on the top of the leaderboars with same score! All with 130 strokes ( 26.00 avg).
The 5 players ( Michele Graffeo, Paolo Porta, Stefano Piccini, Gioacchino Ricchiuto and Michele Perego ) were involved in a playoff to decide the top 4, and at the end the excluded player was Gioacchino Ricchiuto.

These are the scores of the top 5 players after qualification rounds:
1 Michele Graffeo MMC Paderno 27 24 26 28 25 = 130
2 Paolo Porta MGC Novi Ligure 26 26 28 23 27 = 130
3 Michele Perego MC Monza 25 24 25 31 25 = 130
4 Stefano Piccini MT Amatese 25 23 26 26 30 = 130
5 Gioachino Ricchiuto MGC Novi Ligure 30 27 27 24 22 = 130

In the ladies category, the best player was Sara Marchiani which scored a total of 134 strokes with also the new female record on one round with 22 strokes.

The match-play was played with a "particular" round of 18 lanes where each player has to play 9 lanes twice. The 9 lanes where chosen by the Technical Committee, that include the most "technical" and fair lanes. The played lanes were 1,4,5,6,8,12,14,15,17 .

The complete match three can be seen at the bottom links, here we talk about the finals.

The ladies final was played between Anna Catanzaro (MMC Paderno) and Antonella Flamini (MC Aponense) and it was a very close match won by Anna with score 25 - 26 .
The men final was a bit surprising between Stefano Piccini (MT Amatese) and the youngster Nicola Bellucci (ASDMC Follonica) . Nicola was leading the match with up to 3 strokes advantage and 4 lanes to end, trying to become the youngest winner of the Master Final in history. But Stefano made a great recover in the last 4 lanes and tied Nicola 27 - 27 . The match has been won by Stefano at the first extra-lane.
Bronze medal were won in the men category by Paolo Porta (MGC Novi Ligure) , 27 - 27 in the small final against Francesco Leuci (MT Amatese) and in the ladies category by Anna Bandera (MC Monza) , 27 -31 in the small final against Sara Marchiani (GSP Cusano) .

The winter season in Vedano has just started, but it promises to be a very interesting minigolf season, looking at the big international events (12h pairs maraton in January and U-23 Challenge in March).

» Qualification rounds
» Final matchplay

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