The most interesting aspect of this year's Chelmsford & District Summer Table Tennis League was the fact that all four divisions were won by teams who do not play in the Chelmsford League.

ECC Dodos, who took the first division title, included Ian Brown who played regularly last year, but apart from team-mate Andy Dosher who played once, his other team-members Andy Holmes and Gary Bloomfield are completely new to this neck of the woods.

Likewise divisions two, three and four were won by teams from Brentwood with Warley Stars A (division two), Warley Stars B (division three) and Mountnessing A (division four) taking the honours.

Excalibur A sealed the runners-up spot in the second division despite slipping to a 3-2 defeat to St Peters A.

Gary Ward was unbeaten for St Peters but Richard Hiskey and Dave Moles both got the better of Paul Read.

Ward was the outstanding player in this division, only tasting defeat once in 14 matches.

Bearing this in mind his one loss against Duncan Elloy was rated as something of an upset.

It was a great win for Elloy and one that enabled Baddow Village to hammer St Peters 4-1.

This result also enabled Baddow to jump over St Peters into third place.

Ward was involved in another cliff-hanger in this match, just seeing off Ian Wright 23-21, 23-21.

In the first division, Elmtree Graphics A finished off what for them was a rather disappointing season with a result more akin to what one might have expected from them.

Ev and Paul Lucas overpowered Hatfield Peverel A 5-0 but this was only good enough for third place behind GEC and runaway champions ECC Dodos.

Warley Stars B, led by Paul Morris, a leading Romford first division player, were understandably too good for the third division and with Morris and 'super-veteran' Bill Wall firing on all cylinders, they finished their campaign with 5-0 wins over both Mountnessing B and Sun Life.

This gave them an eight point winning margin over Writtle and Maldon, who tied on 22 points with Writtle taking second place by virtue of having won six matches as opposed to the four wins achieved by Maldon.

The leading places in the fourth division were taken by the Mountnessing club and the A side took the title with a 3-2 win over Danbury D.

Arthur Paine and Peter Hardiman both won once but neither of them could get the better of an inspired John Knights, who just edges out Duncan Elloy for the award for the best performance of the week.

Mountnessing B had their work cut out to guarantee second place and just got the better of OCs B 3-2, John Hickey and Bruno Handel doing enough on this occasion.

John Knights carried on where he left off with two more singles wins against OCs B and this gave Danbury D the impetus to seal the match 3-2.

Excalibur finished their season in style by romping home 5-0 against Hadleigh Forum, the father and son combination of Steve and Jamie Cheeseman carrying all before them.

Converted for the new archive on 19 November 2001. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.