Kingston 2 v Guildford 2, Surrey League division 2 match played at the Willoughby Arms, Kingston on 2 December 2024
On the same night that Mark Sheridan slipped, fell and ended up in A&E, missing the match at Epsom, the Kingston 2 team did the same thing collectively (metaphorically speaking) against Guildford 2. There is no other word for our performance but debacle, and I would say the Kingston 2 captain’s place is now in serious jeopardy. (I would say that except the Kingston captain is me.) This loss drags us into the Div 2 relegation mire and might even make us favourites for the drop. It was very ugly.
We had lost two strong players in the 24 hours before the match – one to illness, the other to a bereavement – but the news that Guildford were defaulting bottom board seemed to make our task easier and we still had a rating advantage. But we just didn’t gel.
John Foley, kindly replacing one of the indisposed players at short notice, rushed from a teaching stint at the Kingston Chess Academy, but was exhausted and happy to play out a fairly anaemic draw with White against Guildford captain Malcolm Twigger-Ross. At the time, that result seemed OK, but what followed made it look anything but.
Jon Eckert would be the first to admit he has been struggling for form so far this season, and things went badly for him with Black against Richard Duncalfe on board 5. They played out an interesting line of the French Defence, but the Guildford player did well to accumulate a succession of small advantages and, faced with a losing endgame, Jon resigned. It was a similar story on board 6, where Tony Garrood’s killer bishops – working in perfect harmony – overwhelmed Ye Kyaw’s defences.
The high spot of the evening – the sole bright light in fact – was John Bussmann’s smooth win against Anton Barysenko’s Grünfeld Defence. John is having an excellent season so far and is now pressing for a first-team place – watch this space! It’s really important to have him back and firing, after a long-term injury kept him out for most of last season.
Peter Andrews was up against old foe Seb Galer on board 2 – a critical battle with Peter playing White. Lose this and we really were in trouble. Seb went on the attack in the opening, and by move 10 Peter was already up against it. Peter takes up the story from the position below (one of the nice things about him is that, win or lose, he will cheerfully annotate the game and try to learn from it – a lesson to us all!)
This defeat – surely the result of being under attack for a prolonged period, surviving it, relaxing and then blundering because the worst seemed to have passed – made it 3.5-2.5 to Guildford. They could not lose the match, but we could still draw it – if we could win on board 1, where the estimable Will Taylor had Black against Matthew Dishman.
Matthew had sac’d a pawn for what he hoped was an initiative, but his kingside assault had come to nothing and now Will had queen and four pawns against queen and three. Will was pushing and pushing for the win, but he was also playing on the 10-second increment, whereas his opponent had five minutes left. This imbalance proved fatal.
At one point Will was down to a single second, but he punched his clock just in time. When he went down to the minimum again, however, he was less fortunate and his clock ticked down to zero before he made his umpteenth queen move. A horrible moment. Poor Will had lost a game in which he deserved at least a draw and we had lost the match 4.5-2.5. Now an attritional winter trying to fight off relegation from Surrey Div 2 awaits.
But perhaps I should not despair too much. Worried that Will would be losing sleep over the disaster and keen to send him my commiserations, I sent a supportive email soon after the conclusion the match. “Thanks for asking,” he responded, “but I’m fine. It’s just a game of chess.” Am eminently sensible and rational attitude, and one we sleep-deprived obsessives would do well to replicate. Whatever legendary Liverpool manager Bill Shankly might have said, it really is a game – and not a matter of life and death.
Stephen Moss, Kingston club captain
