INDIAN CALL UP FOR COLEGATE AND GRIFFITHS

Jack Colegate (Rochester & Cobham, Kent) and Curtis Griffiths (Wentworth, Surrey), both members of the England A Squad, will represent England Golf in the 111th All India Amateur Championship at Chandigarh Golf Club on 17th – 22nd January.
This is the first time for several years that England Golf has sent players to this championship, which has a 36-hole stroke play qualifying competition over the first two days from which the leading 32 players proceed to the match play knockout event.
Colegate, 18 (picture © Tom Ward), is an emerging talent on the national scene, having finished tied third in the 2010 Faldo Series Grand Final. Last year, he was fifth in the McEvoy Trophy, equal sixth in the South East Boys Qualifying and joint tenth in the Lagonda Trophy which saw him finish 15th on the Titleist/FootJoy EGU Boys Order of Merit.
Griffiths, 18, was an England under 16 cap in 2009 and made his debut as a boy international in last year’s European Boys Team Championships and also helped England win the Boys Home Internationals. A member of the victorious Surrey team in the 2009 Boys County Championship, he enjoyed a successful 2010 in which he finished runner-up in the South East Junior Championship, tied third in the Brabazon Southern Qualifier and equal sixth in the McEvoy Trophy.
Last year, when he finished seventh on the Titleist/FootJoy Boys Order of merit, he lost a playoff for the Fairhaven Trophy, was fourth in the Sir Henry Cooper Junior Masters and was again a member of the Surrey squad in the Boys County Championship final.
It is six years since England Golf last sent players to the All India Championship but in 2004 James Smith from Kent reached the semi-finals. The only English winner of the title has been former England captain Malcolm Lewis, who triumphed at Calcutta in 1981.
Other former winners include current European Tour players Christian Cevaer of France (1992), India’s Jyoti Randhawa (1993) and South Africans Richard Sterne (2000) and Charl Schwartzel (2001).