The final home-and-away round of season 2021, played at Mueller Park in Subiaco, saw Reg cap a fine season with two wins, to comfortably take the minor premiership. In the day’s closest game, he beat RE 7-5. In his other game, he came from behind to beat Big Pineapple 9-5.

Unfortunately for Reg, those scores weren’t quite enough to get him a 200% for/against ratio for the year. A mere two points more would have done it. As fas as our archivist can tell, the 200% mark at season’s end has only been reached once before, and that was in 2007. On that occasion, some would say that a phenomenon known as “the curse of the minor premier” might have influenced RE’s lacklustre performance in the finals. Since then, a system of allocating preference points for ladder position has been implemented. Bonus points or not, Reg is the hot favourite heading into the finals.

In RE’s other game he beat Psychoceramics (Serge and Brad without Digger) 7-1.

Psychoceramics won their other game, a 7-4 victory over Two Fingers of Scotch in a gruelling but highly entertaining encounter. SuperMario came away with the Remington Shot of the Day, for a fine 12m west-to-east lob that trickled onto the concrete beneath a park bench and then turned to snivel back in a north-westerly direction, coming to rest 8mm from the jack.

That fine shot was also perhaps the high point of the day for Two Fingers of Scotch, as they were pantsed 0-7 by Stingers (Barney playing unencumbered by Buzz Lightbeer and Stella). Those two losses saw TFOS fall to fourth position.

Barney was less successful against the in-form Motherchucker, and he lost 3-8.

With two wins on the day, Motherchucker finished the home-and-away season in second place, his other game seeing him prevail 8-1 over CBGBs (Gonad in the absence of Cannonball and Banker).

A riveting year of all-terrain bocce will come to a crescendo on 24 October 2021.