SCCU Members’ Team Championships – Round 5
Mark Murrell reports on the last round of the SCCU events:
Essex Philpott take full advantage as Surrey falter, falling short of the further half-point they needed to tie their match against a resurgent Kent Haddrell and deny Essex on tie break. The Surrey skipper, Trevor Jones, was the last game to finish with a win required. It was a valiant effort to salvage the draw but the win was asking too much.
Essex Juniors secured the win for Essex Philpott, with Rezin Catabay and Ruqayyah Rida both holding their games from inferior positions with tenacious draws after Kent Steele drew first blood, and wins for the ever improving Lakshan Siddharth and Charukgan Muhunthan. Last to finish Partha Mulay had the luxury of simply playing out for a draw. An all-round team effort coming up on the rails so strongly in the second half of the competition. Winning margin 5½-2½.
Essex Pascoe came back from a three point deficit to tie their match 4-4 against Berkshire, which was enough to maintain third place ahead of Kent Haddrell on tie-break. That was only achieved after a Houdini escape on increments on Board 1 by Andy Lewis, a stalemate swindle from Luoke Wang and excellent technique by Mae Catabay to convert her R + B v R ending after a middle and lower order collapse.
Essex Juniors did not have it all their own way as the newbies from Wanstead were given a lesson in making use of the time, as Essex were edged out in the 8 board Minor match against The Rest 3-5.
In the County Challenge, Outer Essex (excluding players from the Essex London clubs) against The Rest saw Julian Corfield find his form with a well converted N + B v K ending against the Surrey Major Captain and Jonathan Cheung, promoted from the Essex Minor team just before the start of play, winning the last game to finish in the Championships (an example to those juniors starting out in slower play chess) to secure the 5½-3½ win. The Outer Essex v The Rest comprised the top 9 boards of the County Challenge. Link to: scorecard
Congratulations to Essex Philpott, the SCCU MTC Inter Champions, one match point ahead of Surrey.
Finally, a huge thank you to Peter Nickals for marshalling the keen interest of players across the county in all three of the sections. Without Peter there would have been no Essex participation in this event. His maths was quite good too!
The games from the three Essex teams are given on the team pages (links below), the Challenge games are given here.
Essex Team pages: Heppinstall (no match today) | Philpott | Pascoe | Minor