Monday 31th March 2025, MW 11/14

	Ealing A			Hounslow A
1 (b)	Xavier Cowan	1886	0.5-0.5	Mateusz Dydak	2001
2 (w)	Simon Healeas	1812	0-1	Seshagiri Vaddadi	2000
3 (b)	Anthony Braine	1680	0.5-0.5	David J White	1776
4 (w)	Martin Loat	1571	0-1	Leon Fincham	1726
5 (b)	Guiseppe Joe Ramundo	1509	1-0	JJ Padam	1720
6 (w)	Aleksei Garifov	1375P	0-1	Frank Zurstiege	1683
			2-4

We went down again to Hounslow’s A team but kept the scoreline respectable.

Joe gave us a leg up early on with another clinical display to continue his excellent contributions to the team since coming in this year. It would end up being our only win of the evening as the strength of Hounslow proved a bit too much.

Aleksei fought long and hard but found the loss of pawns to be the main issue as he was overrun in the endgame.

Martin was doing well but lost his way somewhere against the veteran Fincham whose grade is probably a little low considering his strength.

Simon ran aground when positional pressure from two particularly menacing knights did the damage. In a rather fixed position, Simon tried to fight on the files but fell to a fork at the end of a series of forced exchanges.

Myself and Tony were left now, both playing the black pieces and both finding the way ahead blocked. In tandem we entered a time scramble: Tony and David agreed a draw (game below) after ducking out of any potential onslaughts with seconds (sensible) whereas myself and Mat kept going as I sought to find some reward for pressure with my more active rooks. That reward never came, and I had to settle for a draw. In the aftermath, we sat there bemused that we had played 3 times and drawn on each occasion.

We march on to clean up the remainder of the season…