For the second Thursday in succession, Jude, Javier and Joshua (the 3-Jays, not to be confused with The O-Jays!) found themselves facing an away trip to Banbury, which must be just about our longest trip of the season. After a good win in the KO Cup Semi-Final, the previous week, it was back to league action this time around, as the A team set about trying to bridge the yawning 3 point gap which the B team had established at the top of Division 1 a few days earlier.
Banbury have a pretty strong and solid team, which can become very strong when IM James Jackson makes an appearance, as he did when Banbury beat us in the reverse fixture earlier this season and administered our only loss to date. He was missing this time, though, which left us rating favourites, but with tough games likely on all boards.
Joshua played his normal gung-ho style on Board 4 against Nathan Manley, sacrificing a pawn (modest by his standards) but he had failed to notice that the queens could instantly be forced off, and it was soon a rook and pawn ending where he was just a pawn down. However, he seemed to defend quite easily and eventually a position was reached where Joshua could claim a threefold repetition. With about 40 minutes on his clock, though, to Nathan's 2, he decided to wait and see what happened on the other boards first. What a team player!
And in fact things were certainly going our way elsewhere. Jude looked right back to form as he had won an exchange against Tom Day on Board 1 and soon made the extra material tell, while on Board 2 Javi played yet another excellent game against Georgs Vikanis and his pieces jumped all over the White position to make decisive material gains. Very impressive stuff.
So Joshua was able to take the draw and clinch the match victory, which left me in play against Danut Joian. The game was level for a long way, but I had an extra pawn, so obviously I was trying to win. Eventually Danut allowed me to open up a kingside file for my rook to come into the game and this should have been decisive. But I played one careless move in time trouble and after an excellent response it was suddenly level again. At which point I played what looked like a crushing pawn sac to get a new queen, and this so confused the situation that it did indeed win - even though a hidden resource meant it should have been just level again. And even then there was time for me to go wrong again and blunder back into another drawing line, but by this time Danut's clock situation was as bad as mine and he failed to find the draw.
This was another big win for us against tough opposition on a very rainy night in Georgia, sorry Banbury. (Can you guess what song's coming?) So the B team's lead is back to 1 point again, and its then 5 points back to third place Stratford A. The A team is in action again next week, so it could be all change. Watch this space!
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