Hendon Tigers off to a winning start

Thursday 15 October, 2009

Hendon’s 2nd team started their Middlesex League season with a fine win over a strong Harrow side, despite being outgraded on all boards.

	Hendon 2		Hendon 2		Harrow
1	Bennett, Michael K	170	½ - ½	Chan, Nevil	181
2	Pepe, Salvatore	159	0 - 1	Blackie, Neville	-
3	Jones, Chris S	151	½ - ½	Rahman, Habib	153
4	Limonov, Petr	144	1 - 0	Williams, Michael J	147
5	Rogal, Chris	143	1 - 0	Chamberlain, Andrew	145
6	Pattni, Kishan	139	1 - 0	Clenshaw, John	142
7	Sabin, Frank	130	1 - 0	Balaji, Eday	142
8	Lennard, Graeme	120	0 - 1	Shah, Dipak K	136
				5 - 3

Match report by Mike Bennett

This season our newly-named Hendon Tigers team is aiming for promotion back to the 2nd Division of the Middlesex League, where we surely belong.

Thursday evening saw the Tigers start with a solid win over a Harrow first team, despite being outgraded on all boards.

Highlights of the match included:

In my opinion the game of the evening; Frank Sabin’s fine example of a minority attack and coolness in the face of his opponent’s kingside counterplay!
Captain Chris Rogal’s calm conversion of a superior bishop ending.
Petr Limonov making it look easy to convert the win after his opponent sacrificed incorrectly.
Kishan Pattni’s strange-looking idea to play f5 – which did the trick of befuddling his opponent, who soon went wrong.
My draw agreed out of mutual respect with Nevil Chan, just as it was about to get interesting…in fact after some feverish analysis in the kitchen we finally worked out that White is lost at the end if Black finds the correct defence, so I’m glad I offered a draw.

I didn’t manage to see much of the other 3 games – I gather that Salvatore Pepe put up a great fight with his opponent in time-trouble, but eventually lost, and Chris Jones had a good solid draw.

The Tigers only have 8 matches this season, so as Chris Rogal said at the end of the evening: “We’re 12.5% of the way there now!”