Post date: 14-Apr-2010 18:16:58
Cowley 2 met the very strong City 1 team at the Oxford City Club in Polstead Road on Monday 18 April. Although the match finished in a win for the favourites, Cowley made a superb effort and threatened for a while to pull off an upset. Club magazine editor Will Burt showed up for the last hour to find that Geoff Rasell had already lost on board five to David Scott. Just as he arrived fellow editor Sean Terry (rather a strong board six!) cleaned up Stephen Burns with a nice Rxf6 sacrifice.
So it was 2--0 to the home team but the handicapping rules of the competition meant that they had to win at least 4--2 to prevail, and a quick look at the top four boards made it clear that would not be easy. Clifford Marcus seemed to have a very nice position against Matt Brown and have a possibility of winning queen for rook and bishop. This soon happened and he closed out a win with aplomb. On board two Rod Nixon had reached a position where each side had queen, rook, knight and three pawns and the placement of every piece seemed critical. It looked like there might be some winning chances with a draw in the bag, but time was against him and in the end that board was lost.
While it would have been expecting a lot of Maria Wang and Heather Lang to conjure up one-and-a-half points from the remaining games (against Mark Hannon and Matt Rose respectively), the actual board positions were probably in our favour. Heather was holding at least a level position into a double rook and pawn ending, while Maria Wang had a good-looking position. In the end both dissolved down to rook-and-pawn endings, which were probably drawn, but went west in the final time scramble. The final scoreline of 5--1 to City 1 (congratulations to them on the double: they also won Division I) does not reflect a fine effort by Cowley 2 (ending a successful season in which they ran out winners of Division II).