It is a very exciting week for the club as we embark on our 3rd (Longplay) Congress this weekend. The club is expected to provide approx 10% of the overall entries which appear to be heading towards 140 or more.
We have played four matches this week with a pleasing record of 3 wins and just 1 loss. The stand out result has to be our Perry Cup B team, our 2nd string of Under 110s going to face favourites Alsager on Tuesday night. Captain Nigel Gardner sent the following report to our Newscaster:
“Great result considering how infinitely worse our team looked on paper against a much stronger Alsager team with just about everyone expecting a fairly one sided match and so it turned out. However, contrary to the prophecies of all it was Crewe who emerged victorious and now march on to the semi-final. Crewe were massively outgraded (21 pts a board on average) but after the first 30 minutes it was evident that all was not going according to the script. All four games were even after the opening exchanges and on board 1 a virtual mirror position had been arrived at and after another half an hour of exchanging off a draw was agreed. The plan (hope) had been to scrape half a point off the top two boards and then win on 3 & 4 so we had already achieved the first objective! 20 minutes later and Lukasz on board 2 agreed another draw against his opponent graded nearly 40 points higher. What was really pleasing to observe was the time Lucasz took in the opening exchanges to provide a firm base for a competitive game. We were now ahead of schedule but Phil & Reinhard still had a long way to go.
Somehow Phil arrived at a position with 50+ minutes left and his opponent with less than 6! A couple of errors transpired on both sides but Phil always seemed to have the upper hand eventually mating his opponent who only had seconds left.
However Reinhard’s game seemed poised on a knife edge but again his opponent was under a bit of time pressure in a very close game. A loss would have meant a loss for the team on board count and we all left the room so Reinhard didn’t feel our support/pressure. 10 minutes later he threw open the doors to announce what was an unexpected but an extremely welcome victory for him and therefore a 3-1 win for the team which we all felt justly proud of.”
This result followed on from the success of our League B team playing its first match of the season against Meir A on Monday night. A superb team performance culminated in a 3.5-0.5 win as Neville Layhe (bd 1), Rick Renegade (bd 2), Simon Layhe (bd 4) all won together with a draw from Chris Rhodes. This was Rick’s first match as B team captain as he tries to follow the success of previous captain Martin Gill, who has led the Bees to the NSDCA Div 3 title twice in three years as reigning champions.
Wednesday night saw the club suffer its first loss of the new season. After 8 successive club victories in all competitions, our D team fell to Fenton C in division 4 of the NSDCA. Only Doug Barnett salvaged a draw from the match as we finished distinctly second best by score of 3.5-0.5 to Fenton. At least the D team had started well last week to hopefully stay in the title race.
The C team captained by Dave Price had decided to take on the challenge of playing in a higher division this year and so joined our B team in division 3. The first match (on Wednesday) was against a strong Newcastle C team. All of the team contributed to the score board with Julian Bulbeck leading the way with a win on bd 3, before captain Dave P won his game to push the team over the winning line following draws from Karl Lockett and David Hulme, to give the team a positive start to the season with a 3-1 win.
In the club’s Rapid-play division 1, Bart Fajfer earned another point to extend his lead, with the super score of 12.5/13.