We knew that we had to beat Clevedon in the return match at their place or our hopes of staying up would be very slim. We expected a tight match but not one as tense as this one turned out to be.

It all started relatively peacefully but Nigel was the exception as he gained the upper hand with relentless pressure from his rooks on the queenside plus a vastly superior knight, all of which forced the win of a key pawn. He also had 30 minutes to not very many which made David P's task of trying to hold the resulting K & P ending impossible.

This was the first game to finish by some distance and happily the others looked highly promising: Mike, because he had more space and was winning a-pawn, Lewis because he had one of those positions with weaknesses to probe and none of his own and Javier, because he was building pressure even if it was at the cost of using far more time. Dave and Martin, meanwhile, were holding boards 4 and 6 with Black. Mike Passmore confidently (and cautiously) predicted a 4-2 win.

The sequence of the closing events was confused with every game fraught with time shortages and the precise order may be open to question but certainly the match became level at 1.5 each. Mike B had been playing really well to win a-pawn against Mike T and be a clear 2 or 3 up according to the engine. But with time running down, the-pawn went to a missed tactic and he felt obliged to accept the second draw offer rather than risk a blunder in time-trouble. This coincided with Stuart unleashing a rook sacrifice on Martin which shouldn't really have worked but, once again, time was at a premium and a discovered check won Martin's queen.

So suddenly the match was horribly in the balance. The good news was that Lewis was building a decisive attack against Dave E, who was also dangerously low on time. The bad news was that Dave was being overrun by a pair of connected-pawns and only had one minute against two, while Javier was blitzing in a wild position and he only had less than half a minute against two. Lewis duly clinched his win but that still only gave us 2.5 game points. Was everything going to slip away again? Mike P downgraded his prediction to 3.5-2.5.

I had given up on Dave by now and was concentrating on Javier. I simply do not know how he manages to play so well so quickly. He was probably a-pawn or two up but, with practically no time left, this was irrelevant and all he could do was bash out instant replies so that steadily DPK's time came down to match his own. Amazingly, he still had six seconds left when DPK's flag fell. With huge relief I turned to commiserate with Dave, only to be greeted with the news that Chris had somehow spent far too long on a move and ended up first losing his advanced-pawns and then losing on time as well. So it was 4.5-1.5 in the end and in all the excitement I forgot to ask Mike P if he wanted to amend his prediction again.

Looking back at our first meeting with Clevedon, I see that we lost 4.5-1.5 after everything went pear-shaped in the closing stages. So this was sweet revenge and perhaps, in securing the victory, we had had a little of the luck that we feel has been missing in some of our earlier matches. It means we are now a point ahead of Clevedon and we both have two matches to play, so we definitely have a glimmer of hope to avoid relegation. But I fear we have more nerve-wracking times still to come!