Gary Hoey, Publicity Officer, Downs Polo Club, On Our Selection News

The Downs Club hosted the 30th anniversary Sapphire Polo Carnival last weekend.

This tournament was started by Hugh Fisher in Goondiwindi in 1992 and moved to Clifton in 2001.

Blessed by fine weather and a large number of teams it turned out to be a magnificent finale to the Downs Polo Club Tournament season.

After two days of very competitive polo, the finals were played with C Grade winners being the Rosewood team of the Skerret brothers Beau and Simon with Paul MacGinley and Launch Leishman.

The B Grade was won by Downs Raff with Richard Marchant, Club President Haydn O’Leary, Angus Gunn and Derek Gilmore.

The A Grade final was a very tough match finally won by the Downs Hooper Accountants team of father and son combination of Stuart and James Hoey, Damian Allport and Jack Mantova. The Downs team overcame a very strong Fitzhenry Polo team comprising Mike Roberts, Aiden Nunn and brother and sister duo of Bingham and Philipa Fitzhenry.

A Grade Champion Pony was won by Aiden Nunn and A Grade champion team of ponies won by James Hoey.

The club and Toowoomba Regional Council deserve a great deal of credit for providing a fantastic field which has had 32 matches played on it over the last three weekends and still provided a magnificent surface for today’s final.

There is probably no other field in Queensland that would be able to handle this amount of traffic.

The club would like to thank everyone who has supported us throughout the year.

This article appeared in On Our Selection News, 4 August 2022.