Ealing A v Kingston A, Thames Valley League division 1 match played at Actonians Sports Club, London W5 on 15 December 2025
Kingston A had a very pleasant time on our visit to Ealing. I was in a good mood before the match had even started. We arrived to find a table strewn with a cornucopia of old chess magazines and books, and we were told we could take any we wanted. With all the material there is online these days, perhaps people don’t value chess books as much as they used to. But I do. I picked up bound volumes of British Chess Magazine for 1994 and 1995, which I would happily have paid money for, and which I have been poring over ever since. Bliss.
In the match itself, our task was to get back on track after the humiliation at Hammersmith. The first game to finish was John Hawksworth v Duncan Grassie on board 5, in which John obtained a slight initiative in the opening, which quickly petered out into a drawn opposite-coloured bishops ending. Still, a draw is a satisfactory result in a team match (as John Nunn once pointed out to me in a rather withering tone after I had overpressed and lost while playing for the England 65+ team).
On board 6, Will Taylor played the Sveshnikov Sicilian and obtained an advantage after his opponent, Alejandro Lopez-Martinez, tried a dubious line with b4 and a4.
On board 2, with Black against Andrew Harley, David Maycock also played a somewhat non-standard opening. By the time we reached the position below, David had already set a number of problems for his opponent, offering a piece sacrifice which his opponent had wisely declined.
In my own game, it was my opponent Jonathan White, playing White obviously, who tried a non-standard opening (1. f4 e5 2. fxe5 d6 3. Nf3 dxe5 4. e4!? Bc5 5. c3 Bb6 6. Na3!?), but I found a little tactic to win the game.
The last game to finish, as usual, was Peter Lalić’s. Peter is the original and best exponent of the don’t-make-the-best-moves-make-the-moves-which-create-problems approach, and his game here with White against John Quinn was of course no exception. Opening with the ludicrous 1. d3 d5 2. e4?!, he subsequently obtained a good position, but unsoundly sacrificed the exchange to obtain a position which was objectively worse, but difficult for Black to play. Black immediately made several mistakes, which I suppose (and it pains me to say this) justified Peter’s play, and Peter won the ending.
So mission accomplished – we won 4.5-1.5 and Hammersmith has become just a bad memory.
Peter Large is captain of Kingston A in Thames Valley division 1
