Missed Opportunity

With IM James Jackson a noticeable absentee from the Banbury team last night, it looked like a golden opportunity for 2 points for our A team. Especially when you think that our B team did the double over Banbury A last year, even with an IM in the opposition ranks for both fixtures! Alas, it was not to be. Despite a substantial rating advantage on every board, by the end of the evening we had to come from behind to salvage a hard-fought draw. Not exactly the championship-winning form we have become used to in recent seasons.

It all started off promisingly enough, as Jude reeled off strong move after strong move on Board 1 against Georgs Vikanis to get a clear advantage. This included a beautiful knight manoeuvre from f6 to a monstrous square on d4. I failed to see the conclusion (as usual) but this was a very impressive game that seemed to be on a different level to the others going on around it! Georgs is a strong player (he must be, he has a massive plus score against me!) but Jude's victory looked inevitable from an early stage.

I was doing very well on Board 3 against Gary Jackson and I was pretty confident we would get at least a half point on the other two boards to get us over the finishing line for the win. But just when my position started to get out of control, the wheels came off in Keatan's and Josh's games. I hadn't appreciated how difficult Keatan's position had been against Tom Day from a very early stage, but the doubled White f pawns seemd to be far more important than the nominal advantage of bishop v knight. Since even with the Black knight on h5 for most of the game, it still held sway over Keatan's bishop. The next thing I knew there was an almight clock-bashing frenzy from both players, but when the excitement stopped, it became apparent that we had lost. A sad way for Keatan to say a temporary good-bye to the team (good luck at Uni, Keatan!), especially as by that stage Joshua had also lost to Paul Rowan. The game had been pretty tense, though Josh's decision to double the Black e pawns didn't seem to have worked out very well as the extra space this gave Paul's pieces seemed far more important than the discombobulated pawn structure. Apparently the end came in brutal fashion with Josh allowing his queen and rook to be forked by a pawn. Ouch! That's got to hurt.

But luckily for us, I managed (for once) to keep my head in some pretty serious time pressure and navigate my way to a win against Gary Jackson after we had gone down the same line of the Sicilian for the 5th time. (Taking my score to 5-0 in the process!) With opposite flank pawn storms against the enemy king, it was a race to see who could land the first blow. It should have been me, but I got side-tracked by the lure of a fairly irrelevant pawn and the position got very messy. However, my attack got a second wind, and despite a very dodgy looking back rank, I managed to win a piece, avoid a couple of banana skins, and take home the full point to rescue the match. And while the match score was 2-2, it was also White 0, Black 4 - which you don't see every day of the week.

So not too many gold stars to be distributed after this showing - except to Jude! We need to pull our socks up - and our fingers out! - on our next outing.

Never mind, though, there's always some great music out there to cheer everyone up.