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Windsor Roosters are the 2008 winners of the Clacton and District League's Handicap Knock-Out Cup.

In the final, the 50th in the league's history, Mark Smith, Daniel Prior and Lewis McKenny - with an average age of 14 - were deserving 5-0 winners over Brotherhood F's Russell Hillier, Carl Fenner and Ian Fielder (average age 19).

The result was as resounding as the score suggests and it crowned a memorable season for the Roosters, who, with fourth squad member Caroline North, also took the division three title.

But elation for the Roosters was matched by disappointment for division two Brotherhood F, particularly for their skipper, Peter Hall, who had controversially omitted himself from the final line-up.

The opening doubles match promised much, suggesting, erroneously as it transpired, that it would be a close-fought final, with Prior and McKenny (+1) for the Roosters and Fenner and Fielder (-1) for Brotherhood sharing the first four sets.

The Roosters took an early 5-0 lead in the decisive fifth set and, although the Brotherhood pair fought back to get back to just 6-5 down, Prior and McKenny upped their game to take the match 11-6 in the fifth. First blood to the Roosters.

Mark Smith (+1) made it 2-0 with a skilled attacking display against an error-prone Russell Hillier (-1) although, as often happens, the Brotherhood player was on the wrong end of a number of unlucky nets and edges.

So Fielder (-1) needed to stop the rot against Prior (+1) in match three but he could never quite get on equal terms in either of the first two sets and it was a nerveless Prior who finally ensured an 11-9, 11-9, 11-3 victory for the Roosters.

It was perhaps the last time when Brotherhood might have got back into the match and, from then on, both the spectators and the Brotherhood trio sensed it was not to be their day.

And it certainly wasn't as McKenny (+1) gave the Roosters a 4-0 interval lead with a clear-cut 11-1, 11-8, 11-2 win over Carl Fenner (-3), looking a shadow of the player who, three days earlier, had played so well to reach the Championships' junior singles final.

The interval merely delayed the inevitable, Smith and McKenny (+1) comfortably taking match five 11-9, 11-7, 11-3 against Hillier and Fielder (-3) and with it the 2008 cup.

And so the Roosters became the first all-junior side to lift the cup since 1999, while it was the first time since 1987 that the final score had ended 5-0, the year when the Thorpe C team of Kevin Hogg, Anne Faber and Stephen Faber beat Great Holland B.

Brotherhood may look to one of a number of factors for their defeat - nerves in front of the largest crowd of spectators for many years, too many unforced errors, the mental inability to deal with the handicap deficits or the non-inclusion of Hall.

But the simple reason is that the Windsor side, gifted young players who throughout the year have shown talent and promise, were just too good on the night and the final may well come to be remembered as the time when the Roosters came of age.

8:29am Thursday 24th April 2008

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