Google Calendar

Friday 22 January 2016

Keep the Holmes Fires Burning

Played at the Navigation last evening -

Marple A               V      Holmes Chapel   Stockport Lge. Div. One  21/01/16

1 A Longson        1-0       JM Turner
2 A Horton          1-0       P Bennett
3 M Fernandez    1-0      M Hancock
4 G Trueman     0.5/0.5  B Scattergood
5 S Hewitt          0.5/0.5   A Raeburn
6 A Hall               0-1        I Bates

                              4-2

Unfortunately(?) I cannot do my usual type of match report as firstly I don't have a lot of time available and secondly as my game was the last to finish I don't have much idea of what happened on the other boards (You didn't have much idea about what was happening on your own board - Ed).

This match was decided by the immense strength of our top three boards. One bystander reported to me that half way through the evening things didn't look particularly great  on any of them but  all extracted the full point although it was  past 10pm before any of the Holmes Chapel team resigned.

My encounter was a game of three thirds. A quite opening was concluded by Ben allowing my Knight to a very nice square on f5 and placing his Queen in a somewhat precarious position.I then missed two very strong continuations on my 18th and 19th moves, one pointed out to me by Andy H after the game. What I played still led to some advantage until I moved my Bishop to the wrong square on move 35. We then entered a levelish but slightly worse ending for me having R +B+3 against R+N+3. The big problem though was by now I only had about three minutes left against twelve. If we hadn't been playing with ten second increments I would almost certainly have lost but I was able to keep the position secure despite having to play very quickly and Ben agreed to a draw on move 51.

Sean made a welcome return to first team action with a very solid draw against Andy Raeburn. Board six was unfortunate for us as Alan had what looked like a winning position until he fell foul of some Ian Bates wizardry. Ian has a very good score against Marple and sad to say he continued that trend here.

Still a good result against always strong opponents, thanks to all who played. Unusually there are no first team fixtures next week but there are plenty of matches scheduled for February to keep us busy.  

No comments:

Post a Comment