The D team was at Olton last night, with a new look line-up. Bernard Rogers has now taken over from me as the captain, so I can lead the C team, and Daniel Bayliss got a late call-up to make his D team debut.
At 7.45 I was the only Kenilworth player in the building, and getting a little nervous, but bad traffic was the culprit. Soon afterwards we had a full team and proceedings got underway.
Bernard was the first to finish, with a pretty quick, very solid looking draw. The other three games were more dramatic. On Board 2, I was up against Trevor Holt. I was in a terrific position out of the opening and despite then making several sub-optimal choices, landed in a relatively routine endgame two pawns up. Somehow I drifted into time trouble, and was conspiring to make it harder than it should have been. However, Trevor unfortunately missed that he was in check, and the only legal move he could replace his illegal move with, lost instantly and he resigned. I would much prefer that this hadn't happened, and having looked at the game briefly this morning, I was still clearly winning. But the rules are the rules, and certainly on the couple of occasions when I've made the same mistake, my opponents have had no hesitation in enforcing touch-move. So we were up 1.5 - 0.5.
On Boards 1 and 4 respectively, Paul and Daniel were both a pawn down, but their prospects looked very different to me. Daniel had a nice tactic to win back his pawn, after which his opponent Kacper Durkarczyk had to contend with a a terrible pawn structure in a double rook and pawn endgame. Daniel played with real fluency, getting his rooks on just the right squares. He then used a pawn lever to excellent effect to break through. A very good debut win, which put us over the line at 2.5 - 0.5!
On Board 1, I really feared for Paul. There was no way for him to get back to material equality, but queen and pawn endgames are always tricky. Paul showed a great deal of imagination in sacrificing more material to open up more lines for his queen. It was pretty high-stakes stuff and made for a nail-biting watch, but Paul had judged the position brilliantly and Rob Reynolds could not escape a perpetual check. A draw ensued.
So 3-1 and a second victory in a row for the team, which has moved us up to 4th in the table. Planning all our teams this season remains a complex task. So, I did just want to echo Bernard's previous plea to some of our less frequent players, to help us out where they can, and to ask that everyone responds promptly to availability asks. A lot of work is going into our selection processes, and everyone can help to make this a little easier...
I would much rather things had landed more happily on the other side of the Atlantic, but at least it was a good night in Olton.
