Hendon Tigers edge past West London 2

Wednesday 4 November, 2009

Hendon’s 2nd team made it 2/2 in the Middlesex League, clinching a narrow win against a strong West London side. The match was played in the elegant surroundings of Chiswick Town Hall.

	West London 2		West London 2		Hendon 2
1	Hayler, Andrew	180	0 - 1	Bennett, Michael K	170
2	Kane, Robert	157	1 - 0	Pepe, Salvatore	159
3	Kamath, Raghu	155	1 - 0	Jones, Chris S	151
4	Tandi, Edward	149	½ - ½	Limonov, Petr	144
5	Barron, Adrian	144	0 - 1	Rogal, Chris	143
6	Brouwer, Reitze	-	1 - 0	Pattni, Kishan	139
7	Robertson, Paul	-	0 - 1	Sabin, Frank	130
8	Macpherson, Robert	-	0 - 1	Lennard, Graeme	120
				3½ - 4½

Match report by Mike Bennett

Tuesday evening saw another victory for the Tigers, this time away against West London 2. Last season we lost this fixture 8-0, and early in the evening it looked like we might be heading for a loss again: we were 1-0 down and seemed to be struggling on a few other boards. However, our strength in depth on the lower boards finally paid off, and we edged the match by half a game point.

I had my head down all evening, and didn’t manage to see much of the other games, so this report is based on brief conversations on the way home, in the Hendon battle-bus (finely driven by Salvatore).

Highlights of the match:

Chris Rogal’s subtle exchange sacrifice for dark-square pressure, which ultimately proved to be correct.
Frank Sabin outplaying his opponent in an opposite-coloured bishops endgame, eventually winning on time in a won position.
Graeme Lennard’s slowly but surely outplaying his opponent throughout the game.
My quite scrappy win: thankfully in the end my opponent blundered his last pawn in a rook ending, leaving me with 2 connected passed pawns.

In the remaining games:

Petr had the better of an interesting draw.
Kish lost fairly quickly (but has promised to develop pieces and castle in future).
Chris Jones looked to be on the wrong side of something akin to an ‘open the h-file sac-sac-mate’ attack, but managed to hold out to the endgame, though that ultimately proved hopeless.
Salvatore lost a tactical battle against the very experienced Bob Kane.

So the Tigers are now on 2/2, with a quarter of our 8 matches played. Next stop for the battle-bus is Enfield in 2 weeks time!