St Benildus have sneaked in through the back door to qualify for a third successive European Cup after a dramatic final day at the National Club Championships.
We started the tournament in confident mood as second seeds, and with four to qualify, all we had to do was finish in the top half of the tournament. Three match wins would almost certainly be enough for qualification, so even if we lost to Gonzaga, we could still afford a slip-up elsewhere to progress. Things, however, did not go that simply!
We had Dún Laoghaire first off, and got off to a decent start. Stephen sacced a piece against Tom O’Gorman and won, which had him rather pleased. Constantin had sacced a pawn against Séamus Duffy, while we were going ok elsewhere. We duly won the bottom two, but Kevin was held to a draw, and then things went a bit awry on the last two boards. Gerry agreed a draw in the position below as black – but had he any better?
He does – he can actually ignore white’s f7 pawn and play 1. Kh2 e2 2. f8=Q Rh1+! 3. KxR e1=Q+ 4. Kh2 Qe2+ and mate next move. Constantin, meanwhile, had lost his attack entirely and was just material down, but fought hard to reach a drawn ending – which, as can be so easy to do, he managed to turn into a lost one in one move.
Still, a 4-2 win was a solid start and probably roughly in line with the ratings. It gave us a big second-round match against third seeds Trinity – if we won, we pretty much had one foot in the finals. So what we didn’t really need was Constantin saccing on f2 after 7 moves, which was complete nonsense; he duly suffered for 90 minutes or so before losing. Stephen won on the top board, but it was a bit of disaster elsewhere. Gerry fought hard from a worse position to reach a theoretically drawn ending, but went wrong and lost. Zdravko forgot his opening and was held to a draw, Kevin blundered and let his opponent’s queen in with fatal results, and Tim let slip a nice attack and ultimately lost, as we went down 4½-1½. Elsewhere, a key result was Ballinasloe beating Dún Laoghaire 3½-2½ – the first of many key narrow wins which went our way to create the tight finish which we ultimately benefitted from.
We were missing Stephen for the Saturday evening match – we had hoped that we could beat Trinity and so be missing Stephen for the largely dead-rubber game against Gonzaga, but instead we were missing our top player for a key match against Elm Mount, knowing that we in all likelihood still had Gonzaga to come – in fact, the way the boards were panning out, it seemed that whether we won or lost, we would be likely to play Gonzaga and UCD on the Sunday. A win against Elm Mount and, again, we would be almost guaranteed to qualify, but a loss and we were getting into the realm of depending on others for favours.
Gerry took a bit of a thumping against David Fitzsimons, but we out-rated our opponents on all the other boards – not that you’d have known it! Constantin lost again, this time when pushing too hard an in a drawn same-colour bishop ending. Dylan swapped an active bishop for a passive knight, then missed a refutation to a sac which ultimately cost him the game. Tim fought hard to take the draw, while Kevin settled for one relatively early – a stale enough middle-game; he was to work harder for a draw later on in the weekend! – and only Brendan won after a nice attack from the middlegame. So another comprehensive defeat against a lower seed – and we were in big trouble.
The draw predictions came true as well – Gonzaga had played each of the teams on 4 points, and so they had to float down to play us as highest-seeded team on 2 points, even though we were actually behind Dún Laoghaire in the standings. Trinity and Elm Mount went head-to-head, but of far more importance to us was the match between Dún Laoghaire and Bray – if Dún Laoghaire could win, then it was entirely possible that four points would be enough to qualify.
We did get off to a decent start against Gonzaga – Dylan (who got to bed at 1:30am the previous night) was offered a draw by his opponent (who had gotten to bed at 4am) after 6 moves, and decided to make hay while the sun shone. On the one hand, taking a draw on the board we were closest-matched in ratings may have seemed like a bad idea in a match we possibly needed to win – but on the other hand, if the rest of the Gonzaga team had offered such early draws, we’d have snapped them all up!
They didn’t, though – we may have slightly wounded their pride when inflicting a first league defeat in five years on them recently. Only Kevin held a draw, but he was made to fight for it – 91 moves in total, including 16 from a clearly drawn B v N+P ending. Gerry was worse against Henry Li FM, but fought back to reach a theoretically drawn endgame a pawn down, but just when it looked like a second result against him in a month was on the cards, he went wrong and the draw was gone.
The real drama was in the Dún Laoghaire v Bray game though. With Bray already on two wins, we needed them to lose – but narrowly, so we could still catch both teams on tie-break. Things were looking good early on when Dún Laoghaire got big advantages on two boards, but then frustrating things started to happen. On board 6, Dún Laoghaire were a solid pawn ahead, but then swapped off all the heavy pieces to enter an opposite-colour bishop endgame. And they were a pawn ahead on board 4 as well, only for their player to overlook a counter-attack and go from +2 to -2 in one move. This attack built up, and soon Dún Laoghaire were a rook down. Then another twist – Bray made a mess of the opposite-colour bishop endgame and somehow lost it, and with results going perfectly on the other boards, it was looking like the missed counterattack would decide the match in Bray’s favour.
But as both players entered time trouble, Bray hung a rook – the pawn protecting it was pinned – only for Dún Laoghaire to miss it. Still Bray were on course for a match win which would move them to 6 points and out of our reach. But there was another twist – Bray hung a piece, and now had a rook for piece and two pawns. And on the very next move, Bray swapped off rooks to give Dún Laoghaire an unstoppable passed pawn. In successive moves, the game had swung from -5 to -1 to +5 to +10 to 1-0! Tom O’Gorman made Colm Daly work exceptionally hard for a win in a fascinating 2N+2 v 2B+4 ending, but ultimately lost to mean Dún Laoghaire won by 3½-2½ – exactly the score we wanted.
As we were now second last, we were up against bottom seeds UCD. Gonzaga and Trinity were out of reach, but Dún Laoghaire were up on the top board against Gonzaga, where a defeat was pretty much inevitable – the only question was could they take enough points to keep ahead of us. Trinity and Elm Mount were up against Bray and Ballinasloe respectively, and amazingly, “all” we needed was a big win against UCD – say, 5-1 – any win for Trinity and Elm Mount, and a 5-1 win for Gonzaga against Dún Laoghaire.
And there was even better news when the teams were declared – UCD, Dún Laoghaire and Bray were all missing their top boards, and indeed UCD only had five players, meaning we started with a walkover win for Zdravko to settle early nerves. And 90 minutes in, things were going way better than we could really have hoped for. Stephen and Constantin had both won – Constantin getting his first point of the weekend against his other club; UCD had Luke Hayden, ex Benildus, on 5 – and Gonzaga were 1-0 up against Dún Laoghaire while Elm Mount were 2-0 up against Ballinsloe. A bit over two hours in and Brendan had won to make it 4-0, and with Gerry a piece up, we had already done what we could do; it was now over to others. Gonzaga were 2-0 up, but we needed them to keep racking up the points, while Trinity had neutralised Bray’s top board in taking a draw off Colm Daly; that game was locked at 1-1.
Gerry duly won his game, and Gonzaga were turning the screw on Dún Laoghaire – 4-0 there meant that one more point in our favour in any of the last three games and Dún Laoghaire were out of the race, while we also just needed one more point for Elm Mount to rule out Ballinasloe. Trinity v Bray was the key game, and Trinity had just missed a one-move win. What should white play here?
1. QxR! and black can resign. 1. … PxQ 2 BxP+ KxB 3. RxQ and white is up a pawn and a piece. Instead, the game went on until white was three pawns up – and then a draw was agreed! This, added to a computer error when board 6 was incorrectly given as a Bray win when they were just four pawns down, didn’t make for comfortable watching – but ultimately, Trinity reached 3½ shortly afterwards, and Bray were out of it.
Tim was held to a draw in our last game, meaning we had won 5½-½, while Gonzaga completed their first whitewash of the tournament to put Dún Laoghaire out of contention. So that just left Ballinasloe, who were hanging on 1½-2½ down against Elm Mount, needing to win the two remaining games to pip us. In one of those, they were five pawns down, but amazingly did have some tricks left. Added to that the fact that Ballinasloe recognised how important the game was, and it meant it dragged on for longer than would otherwise have been polite – but finally Ballinasloe ran out of tricks and resigned, which brought about a quick draw on the other board as well.
So in the end, we have scraped into a third successive European Cup – although in our defence, we played each of the top three, which no-one below us did, so we did have a slightly tougher draw over the course of the weekend. Stephen put in a sterling shift on 1 with 3/4, matched by Brendan on 5. Tim scored 2/4, Gerry, Kevin and Zdravko scored 1½ from 5, 4 and 2 respectively, Constantin got 1 and Dylan picked up his – efficient! – draw.
The finals tournament will be in Budva Montenegro from the 9th to the 17th of November. Next year’s NCC will be in Munster on the 9th and 10th of May, with the finals tournament in Mayrhofen in Austria – so get practicing!