It's tough against a team like Clifton A. You can't expect to keep turning over teams with minus 18.5 average grading points – and so it turned out.

It's especially tough with Black. Nigel has scored 50% in the last fortnight against Beaumont, Buckley and Cobb. Not many achieve that! But tonight James had too much firepower and, according to him afterwards, Nigel made a couple of slips, and that was that.

Boards 3 and 4 were next to finish and both saw the defeat of the Sicilian. Both involved an early Nxc6. In Martin's case on 3, Duncan followed up with Qd4 attacking a rook on h8. Although theoretically a good line for black it was very messy and Duncan managed to obtain pressure, leading to control of a key file and, eventually, a tactic which won quickly.

In my case the follow up was to allow an exchange of queens and concede a seemingly dubious pawn setup. But it served to get Dave away from his more familiar variations. He relinquished a-pawn which he reasonably expected to recover but in attempting to do so, he tried a bishop sortie which didn't work. Then, very luckily for me, he failed to move it when it was en prise and resigned a few moves later.

So 1–2 down and quite a wait for the other three games to finish. Abid on 6 had won an exchange but after a turnaround was a-pawn down in a rook endgame – quite possibly tenable though. Conversely Michael had achieved a decent positional advantage only to make one false move which cost the exchange. He was almost certainly losing but he did have a time advantage. Andrew's game was blocked and probably heading for a draw.

The first to finish was Michael, who uncorked some fine attacking moves. You couldn't ask for a better display of coolness under pressure and the end result was a double check with mate! By now, though, Abid's endgame had proved too difficult to hold and finally he had to concede when a-pawn got through.

Now 2–3 and only a win would get us anything from the match. Andrew and Dominic were down to less than a minute each and a draw would have been a fair result but, unfortunately, Andrew's seconds ticked away more quickly and he lost on time.

So, an honourable defeat, and meanwhile, just across the room, our C-team defeated the division 2 leaders, Clifton C. Some compensation, at least, and that result could ultimately be quite important for the division.

Next up, our own B-team. Can we do better than last time?