Sophie Williams Blog

Excalibur Trophy

This weekend I competed at the Excalibur Trophy, an inter-county team competition, between 12 different counties. I was fencing for Cornwall in women’s foil, which is not my main weapon, but as I have some experience fencing it, I agreed that I would do it instead of sabre as we have a large number of sabreurs in Cornwall already. The team event was run as a poule-like scenario with three members in each team. Each person on your team fenced each person in the opposing team. The first person to five hits wins the bout and the team with the most victories overall wins the match.
It took me a while to get into the flow of fencing foil again as it has been quite a while since I last did it! But we started confidently winning our first match 8-1 against Kent, and winning our second match 7-2 against Warwickshire. We then drew Hampshire; we knew they would be our toughest match, with all three fencers being international foilists. Our team captain, Hannah Bryars, fenced really well, winning two of her three fights. But sadly I and Maxine McCombie couldn’t hold them off and we lost the match 7-2. Our only other close match of the day was against Notts and Derby, which we narrowly won 5-4, and we beat Somerset 9-0. On the second day we had the remainder of our matches. Firstly there was Surrey, our biggest rival for the overall trophy, but we fought well to beat them 6-3, and after that we beat Gloucester 8-1 and then lost to Devon 6-3, although we should have beaten them. We then went on to beat Dyfed 7-2 and Leicester 7-2. We also had a default 9-0 victory of Middlesex as they didn’t have a women’s foil team. This meant that we came 2nd in the women’s foil and that largely contributed to Cornwall winning the Excalibur trophy for the first time ever since joining the competition in 1999.
I am now back training (with my proper weapon!) for a senior A-grade in Ghent this weekend.