We have now played the two league leaders three times in succession and, although we lost all three, we can count ourselves as having been a bit unlucky in two of them.

I didn't see much of the other games, being last to finish. I understand Javier came close to refuting James' piece sacrifice but the attack broke through in the end. Nigel drew fairly comfortably and quickly with John.

Boards 3 and 4 were next to finish and here we shared the points. Mike was holding Duncan in a complicated and time-consuming Queen's Indian when he overlooked a tactic as time started to run lower. White kindly reciprocated but unfortunately Mike was "still blind" to the threat and next time Duncan did see it, winning the exchange. Meanwhile Martin played calmly to build a superior position. Still level on material by the time the heavy pieces came off, he had a knight that was better than Dave's bishop, a centralised king and weak pawns to aim at. It was just a question of excellent technique to finish the job.

So we needed a bit of a miracle, one and a half points from Dave and me, to salvage something from the match. Dave was defending dourly until Igor mislaid a knight, so suddenly Dave found himself almost certainly winning but with less than a minute remaining was obliged to accept a draw offer. I had probably been about half a-pawn down against Dominic throughout the middle game but by move 40 the computer says it was level. There was a remote possibility of a swindle by winning on time as we were both so low, but in fact I missed the best moves and duly succumbed, making the final score 2-4.

You need a tad more luck than we have been getting to win points against the top teams but let's hope our fellow relegation strugglers fare just as badly when it is their turn to face them. Interestingly, I see that Horfield A have just tweeted that they went down 4.5-1.5 against a "full strength" South Bristol. It sounds like SB fielded all their stars for just the second time - the first was against us, and we only narrowly lost a cliffhanger. It's a funny old game!