This year it was the turn of Wales to host the tournament. The continuing Covid pandemic prevented us from booking a venue for an over the board tournament and so we held a hybrid event, whereby each nation gathers its players together in one central venue and they then play on line, under supervision. This format provided a number of technical problems, all of which were adequately dealt with by our arbiters, Adrian Elwin and Peter Purland. As in previous years, we were restricted to the four home nations, which meant a six round all play all competition.
Once again, Nicholas Evans acted as team manager for all of our teams and he did an excellent job, greatly encouraging and enthusing all the players, enabling them to enjoy the tournament. John Thornton kindly helped him with the post match analysis.
Nicholas writes, ”After a difficult couple of years it was lovely to see so many friendly faces back in person during the hybrid set up for this year’s Glorney Cup. Wales had some very tough opposition in the form of strong English, Irish and Scottish teams, but battled very heartedly throughout. Although we may have struggled to win a few matches, there were some fantastic signs for the future, with all the players taking on lots of advice and implementing these ideas in their later games.”
Covid 19 continues to exert its evil influence. We were restricted both in the number of players available and in their quality, so much so, that we were unable to field a Gilbert team. Matters were made worse when two players decided to withdraw two days before the event was due to begin and I was left scrabbling around for non- existent reserves. We defaulted on a total of six occasions for the Robinson and Stokes teams. (The tournament rules allowed two reserves for each team. We had just one reserve for the Glorney team.)
The Glorney team did much better than last year, drawing two matches against Scotland and Ireland. The two younger teams were massively out graded and predictably came fourth by a long way. The Stokes team managed to draw its last match against Scotland, but all the other matches were lost. Our best individual performance was by Ellison Smith, who scored 3.5 out of six. Ifan Rathbone-Jones scored 2.5 out of four on top board for the Glorney team and David Belochkin scored 2.5 out of four for the Stokes team. The final positions were as follows:
Glorney England 23.5, Scotland 14.5, Ireland 12, Wales 10.
Gilbert England A 16, England B 13, Scotland 4, Ireland 3.
Robinson England 27, Ireland 22, Scotland 16.5, Wales 6.5.
Stokes England 27, Scotland 21, Ireland 17.5, Wales 6.5
The final scores of our players were:
Glorney I.Rathbone-Jones 2.5, C.Guha 1, D.MacDonald 1, E.Smith 3.5, Y.Wu 1, B.Szakmany 1.
Robinson T.Davies 0, E. Challoner 2, K.Bagga 2, R. Sequeira 1.5, T. Ryan 0.5, A. Kulkarni 0.5.
Stokes E. Kong 2.5, F.Nasir 1, K. Enoch 0.5, L. Davies 0, D.Belochkin 2.5, L. Zheng 0.
