Turkish Delight but isn't it time some other

country hosted the European club final?

By COLIN FARQUHARSON
Scottish club champions Prestwick, represented by James Bunch, Jonathan King and Allan Thomson, finished 12th in a field of 24 teams for this year's European club team championship at Klassis Golf & Country Club, Istanbul in Turkey.
King (217 for the three rounds), Thomson (223) and Bunch (231) totalled 440 on a best two daily scores to count basis.
The scoring was rather hot at the sharp end of the tournament with the host club amazingly being able to field a team of three players able to beat the rest of Europe, each with a sub-par 54-hole aggregate. Some shooting, but what a coincidence.
Had their players been members of the Klassis club for some time or were they recruited especially for the occasion? Perhaps there should be a rule that competitors in the European final must have been members of the participating club for at least five years.
It's not the first time Klassis has hosted the tournament. Time to pass the honour around?
The Austrians from the Murhof club almost upset the Turkish Delight by matching the home trio's final total of 23-under-par 415.
The tie-breaker was a countback of the three discarded scores. And Klassis had a better non-counting total than Murhof, so they were crowned European champions.
The man with the lowest individual three-round total played for the third-placed German club team, St Leon-Rot, but with a name like John Allen he sounds very like a British citizen. Over a par-73 course, Allen had a 13-under-par aggregate of 206, very good indeed for somebody we've never heard of before.
FINAL TOTALS
Par 438 (6x73), teams' best two individual scores daily to count for aggregate
415 TURKEY (Klassis G&CC)
bt Austria (Murhof GC) on countback on non-counting scores
208 Gencer Ozcan 64 76 78.
210 Koray Varli 70 73 67.
214 Hamza Hakan Sayin 73 73 68.
415 AUSTRIA (Murhof GC)
206 Lukas Nemecz 69 68 69.
209 Tobias Nemecz 73 67 69.
234 Christopher Taferner 84 75 75.
416 GERMANY (St Leon-Rot GC) 3rd
206 John Allen 69 69 68 (individual winner).
211 Alexis Szappanos 72 75 64.
220 Sebastian Schwind 73 74 73.
Selected scores:
431 ENGLAND (Workington GC) 7th.
215 Seb Crookall-Nixon 73 71 71.
217 William Bowe 75 70 72.
223 Mark Cowen 77 75 71.
440 SCOTLAND (Prestwick GC). 12th.
217 Jonathan King 71 72 74.
223 Allan Thomson 70 77 76.
231 James Bunch 75 80 76.
452 WALES (Marriott St Pierre GC) 15th.
225 Stephen Whitty 73 78 74.
231 Liam McVeigh 75 78 78.
234 Richard Bentham 80 80 74.
455 IRELAND (Galway GC) 16th.
225 Joe Lyons 77 73 75.
232 Damien Coyne 73 82 77.
242 David Scully 79 80 83.