Geneva 2024: The World's Most Cosmopolitan Fives Tournament
John Reynolds reports:
16/09/24: Forty players from all over the world have just celebrated the game of Eton fives at a tournament on the beautiful azure courts just outside Geneva.
The Geneva fives club – run by alumni of the Lyceum Alpinum Zuoz, an international boarding school in the Swiss Alps – hosts the tournament each year and invites students from the lyceum and fives lovers from England. The result is surely the most diverse entry of any fives tournament, with players of both sexes across a 60-year spread from all over the world.
Six members of the Old Citizens Eton Fives club (Alexander Kasterine, Edwin Gosnell, Martin East, William East, Massimo Melessaccio and John Reynolds) were joined this year by former Kinnaird finalist Richard Tyler who is the new owner of the two Eton fives courts in northern Provence – these were built perhaps 15 years ago in a farm house in Grillon – in a rare convocation of the French Eton fives community.
Richard came away with the title - some 30 years after he first visited the courts, then with his erstwhile partner Tony Hughes.
The whole event – for the Benny Oei tournament (named after a gentleman of the game who died a few years ago) – was hosted by the club's new president, Florian Gautier, and run efficiently and entertainingly by former Kinnaird champion Matt Wiseman. He is now the resident coach in Zuoz and has nurtured and developed the game there so that the standard of fives rises every year – several pairs will take part in the national schools' championship later in the year.
Old Citizens have been playing fives with Zuozers for a century or so - ever since the 1920s, when a group of the lyceum's students came to England and met the Old Citizens at Queen's Club. The relationship continued after the war when a group of players - including current OCEFC chairman David White, EFA vice-chairman Gordon Stringer, and the world's oldest player David Cooper (now in his 80s but still on court from time to time) - began to visit the lyceum.
We will see some of these Zuozers again next month when they come to London to help mark the EFA's centenary.
