With a strong team in place, I was looking forward to a relatively relaxed evening watching the games as non-playing captain. As it transpired, the match was a nerve jangling affair which went down to the wire.

We started well when a blunder by Aga’s young opponent gifted her a knight and Aga duly converted to give Ealing an early lead. This was a relief as, prior to the blunder, the position was essentially level.

Then things stared to go awry. Playing with these white pieces, Daniil failed to gain any traction from the opening and perhaps over ambitiously looking to open some attacking lines, neglected his king safety. With black knight and queen eagerly eying up a mighty outpost in front of Daniil’s king, the coup de grace was applied by a spectacular rook sac on h2.

Meanwhile, on the other white Ealing board, Jason’s game was sliding backwards from a position of early promise to a very awkward endgame. With his rook forced to defend against the coronation of black’s h-pawn, the black queen posed insoluble problems on the queen-side. This was apparently black’s first game of chess at classical time controls in thirteen years not that it mattered much, as he played the whole game in blitz mode.

Suddenly the visitors led 2-1 on the night. All credit to Hatch End who made a mockery of the rating differences to score these two big upsets.

I was encouraged by the solid progress Alex was making in his game. Patiently building up the pressure and deploying his pieces on optimal squares he finally crashed through with an unanswerable attack.

So the match hinged on the outcome of the game on board one, where Simon, in his typically solid style had established a solid position but was it enough to net a win? Happily, Simon found an elegant way to break open the position, breaking up the pawn structure in front of white’s king with f4, the offer of a knight sac (rejected) followed by a rook sac on f2. When the fireworks subsided, Simon had a winning endgame, a bishop and two pawns to the good.

Here’s the finish to SImon’s game:

So Ealing ultimately prevailed against our plucky opponents. Curiously, black won in all the games.