GOLF: The gales of last Sunday week caused the Suffolk Winter Alliance meeting at Newton Green to be abandoned.Although play started at 8am, the meeting was called off at 11.30am when conditions had become too dangerous and the course unplayable.

THE gales of last Sunday week caused the Suffolk Winter Alliance meeting at Newton Green to be abandoned.

Although play started at 8am, the meeting was called off at 11.30am when conditions had become too dangerous and the course unplayable.

It is the third successive year that the popular Newton Green meeting has been affected by weather conditions.

In the previous two years it was fog and a waterlogged course that prevented any play.

In each case the meeting was rearranged for later in the season and secretary Phil Segger is hopeful that a new date will be found before next April.

The wind was so strong, coupled with the rain, that on the 17th hole golf balls were being blown across the main road causing a danger to the traffic.

By the time the meeting was abandoned, there was only one score returned.

Mark Lay (Waldringfield) amassed 34 points, playing on his own from the sixth hole after his father Peter, a Rushmere member, had walked in finding the wind impossible to cope with.

There was a field of 116 players, but some of them had not started their round when the decision was taken to call a halt as the wind had become stronger.

The next Alliance meeting is tomorrow at Rookery Park where there is a field of 90.