Metropolitan I 4.5 Ealing II 3.5
: Created:13 Mar 2009 , by Alastair JohnstoneA frustrating evening ended in a narrow defeat for Ealing II in the Middlesex League.
| Middlesex League Div. 2 | Thursday 12th March 2009 | ||||
Bd | Metropolitan 1 | Gd. | Ealing 2 | Gd. | |
1 | Dickson, George | 166 | 0-1 | Greenshields, Chris | 149 |
2 | Vachtfeidl, Petr | 167 | 1-0 | Default | |
3 | Calvert, D Ian | 162 | 0.5-0.5 | Sanchez, Miguel | 142 |
4 | Doye, Peter C | 158 | 0.5-0.5 | Winterbotham, Mark | 133 |
5 | Stewart, Noel M | 136 | 0-1 | Turp, Michael-John | |
6 | Kitchen, John F | 142 | 0.5-0.5 | Harvey, John T | 126 |
7 | Cooke, Charlie | 126 | 1-0 | Johnstone, Alastair G | 122 |
8 | Szabo, Peter L | 114 | 1-0 | Default | |
4.5-3.5 | |||||
An unfortunate misunderstanding about the early start-time led to our gifting a 2-0 lead to our hosts. Forty-five minutes had already elapsed on the clocks when the Shalabayev brothers calmly walked into the playing hall only for their faces to drop when they learnt their games had already been decided on default.
2-0 became 3-0 when Alastair's King's Indian Defence went sadly wrong and succumbed rapidly to an unanswerable White attack.
Elsewhere, however, Ealing were demonstrating their traditional stubborn resistance and first Miguel Sanchez, then John Harvey achieved commendable draws against higher ranked opponents, taking the match score to 4-1.
Although we needed to win all three remaining games to get anything from the match, we came close to achieving it. On board 5, Michael Turp gained a pawn advantage and showed great spirit to win his match, while skipper Chris Greenshields outplayed his highly-graded opponent in the quickplay finish (Chris says he swindled the exchange when his opponent pressed for a win in a drawn endgame, but I suspect he's being modest). Finally, on board 4, Mark Winterbotham built up some strong pressure but couldn't quite find a way through.
So the final score was 4.5-3.5 to Metropolitan. With only one genuine defeat on the night, we were all left wondering what might have been had we not defaulted 2 boards...