Match Report: Horfield A vs Downend A (21 September): Coming up short.

Our first A team game of the season against a strong Downend team who had already played a match against their B team this season.

I am confident over at Downend Towers they will have created a report with accurate technical analysis of the match based on having seen the games in question rather than relying on anecdote and supposition. Of course that is their right, and I don’t in anyway consider accuracy and facts to be an inferior version of the truth. This report is more Turner’s Venice than Canaletto’s.

So with broad brush strokes this is sort of what happened. We suffered on the bottom two boards. James had finished before it is usually polite to do so; his ‘I’ve never played it before’ Caro-Kann didn’t stand up to Aron’s scrutiny. Next Prakash got into positional trouble against Dominique’s unconventional KID and castling queenside gave black the target he wanted and the point.

I think Peter and Nigel were next to finish with a hard-fought draw of which I saw nothing but in my mind it was keenly fought and accurate. Peter tells me this was the case. Messers Kirby and Hosken now have a beautiful P6 D6 record against each other. This was followed by Phil scoring Horfield’s sole win of the evening. Phil showed me his game afterwards and I failed to understand any of it, but it seemed impressive in an always on the edge of disaster dynamic sort of way.

This drew us closer on the scorecard but we weren’t able to quite make up the ground on the top two boards. I caught a glimpse of Matias’s and Oli’s game close to the end and it looked like a draw. It was. On the top board Derek tells me that Stephen created what felt like potentially game-winning pressure with a pawn sacrifice on Derek’s kingside but black had resources and the ending (with less than a minute on both clocks) was agreed as a draw.

Regardless of the result it is good to have chess back.

1	Derek Pugh (2170)	.5	Stephen Meek (2140)	.5
2	Matias Candelario (2140)	.5	Oli Stubbs (2073)	.5
3	Peter Kirby (2035)	.5	Nigel Hosken (2058)	.5
4	Phil Nendick (1960)	1	Aldrin Malibiran (UNG)	0
5	James Facey (1660)	0	Aron Saunders (1908)	1
6	Prakash Chatterjee (1653)	0	Dominique Conterno (1885)	1
	Horfield A	2.5	Downend A	3.5