Hillingdon Div 2 Tue 30th Apr 2024

Board	Home	Hatch End B		Ealing B	Away
1 (B)	1553	G Gill, Veer	0 – 1	P Healeas, Simon	1850
2 (W)	1545	G Delendrea, Cristian	½ – ½	G Obihara, Jason	1771
3 (B)	1374	B Wani, Shreya	0 – 1	B Georgiou, Matthew	1741
4 (W)	1099	S Dagli, Samir	1 – 0	B Lawrence, Clive	1606
5 (B)	1086	S Sylvester, Luke	0 – 1	B Johnstone, Alastair G	1585
Total	6657		1½- 3½	Total	8553

Ealing B completed their league season with a relatively comfortable win against a Hatch End B team packed with Juniors.

There was consequently a huge difference in rating but, as Clive’s defeat on four and Jason’s draw on five show, that is no guarantee of predicted results ensuing.

My own game was again first to finish, my opponent obligingly going astray on move five. It was all downhill from there although he played well in the latter part of the game.

None of the other games were trivial. Jason couldn’t gain any traction against his opponent’s French Exchange setup and although he fought it out to the end a draw was the best that could be achieved.

Simon accurately repelled his opponent’s attempts to set up attacking threats (although at one stage I thought I spotted a risk of him giving up the exchange) eventually breaking through with a winning attack.

Some jeopardy entered the equation when Clive, on his debut appearance for the team, sadly missed a mate-in-one threat, after seemingly being quite comfortable.

So the match hinged on Matthew’s game. Although he had to work hard to gain a decisive advantage, he ultimately prevailed when he left his queen en prise to set up a back rank mate.

We will likely finish in second place in Div.2 with Harrow C poised to thwart our promotion ambitions but, in spite of this, it has been a good campaign with +10 =1 -1 from our twelve league fixtures and, courtesy of the tremendous win against Hatch End A, we can still win some silverware by winning the Plate final against Hatch End B on May 13th.