Both teams were short of regular players with Chris and Charlie unavailable for the 'A's and Nigel and Dave for us. We had known about this for some time and lined up Lewis and Dominique as cover. Theirs was a fairly last minute problem, made trickier by 'C' and 'D' team matches this week, so they were grateful to be able to call up Will and Jack.

The first two games to finish were the battles of the reserves. Jack gave me plenty to think about and I consumed an hour more than him just to secure a-pawn advantage. More material accrued later when he missed a couple of tactics but rest assured we shall be seeing a lot more of this young man! Meanwhile Dominique was not having it all his own way against Will and a blocked position was reached where they shook hands.

I think the middle boards were next. When Martin elected to retreat a knight it transpired that Mike M could win a-pawn and catch Martin's King in the centre with a follow up that almost played itself. Before the match started there was some banter about the likely outcome of a game between Jerry and Mike B. The 'B' word was even mentioned. I won't say it really was boring but I did doze off when playing through the moves! After all that drama it meant the match was tied at 2-2.

The top two boards were similar in that both Blacks were seriously down on the clock. After much jockeying for position, Henry pushed a-pawn to a square where it turned out to be lost. Javier eliminated the Queens and then, with time running lower, found a series of forcing moves which gave Henry some unpalatable choices. He opted to give up the exchange but Javier, now down to less than two minutes, converted to a trivially winning endgame. Meanwhile Lewis built pressure against Richard, who was also running short of time. Material was still about equal after 30 moves but time told in the end and Lewis clinched the match 4-2.

It was a bit unsatisfactory that the match had to be played with four substitutes but unarguably the match was decided by the heavyweights on boards 1 and 2. I wonder if we might prevail upon the webmaster to put these two interesting struggles up on the website. (Edit: Voila! Duncanson vs Ruano Marco and Martin vs Savory.)

Could this be the beginning of a meaningful recovery for us?