Lewes vs Uckfield

The Junior Rapid Play team has also finished off its league fixtures with an away match against the league leaders Lewes.  Mindful of that I decided to field our strongest team on paper to see if we could assess how competitive we might have been.  That proved interesting as we more than matched them.  Lydia Munn was outstanding on board 4 and dispatched her opponent in very quick time.  Oliver Christian on Board 3 surprisingly lost a piece very early on, then fought hard to regain it and at one stage seemed positionally well placed. Hugo played an uncharacteristically very open game and did not develop well, which his opponent took advantage of and eventually cruised to a win, bringing the scores level.  Back to Oliver, sadly they each had a bishop but Oliver’s became pinned and he did not take long enough to consider the response, so his opponent gained the piece up for a pawn and then showed strength in the endgame to progress to passed pawns. The match between Benedict on Board 1 and a top Sussex junior was a joy to behold, with no quarter given either way and unusually (albeit much to the delight of his coach) this time Benedict played smartly and kept his opponent in time deficit, until that became a time difficulty and in the course of the game I did not see him make a bad move. The end was quite exciting as the opponent stayed on 15 seconds to a minute for about ten moves, but finally Benedict moved towards a splendid finish and the other lad resigned.  So we drew 2-2 with the top team in the league and are the only team to have taken something from them over the whole season !  All of that said, we have used in match play nine of our ten squad players and therefore given a taste of the MSL experience to many juniors who will hopefully progress through the club to our full teams.  We are currently third in this division with a game to go, and I think I took the right course but am happy to be challenged at the AGM if others think differently.