English Chess Forum

The Team lists for the 2009 - 10 season are now at http://www.4ncl.co.uk/

Quietly confident we can get promoted if we beat Barbican "youth" when hungover.

Ben

And if Barbican "youth" are not hungover?

Whoa, Cheddleton are strong.

Almost comparable with Guildford 1, one might argue

Our aim is double promotion this year, which is optimistic considering the first team have not won a match in its last 11.

Warwickshire Select also made 0/11 in the first division (in 2003/4), and then they almost won repromotion the following year. A last round win against Kings Head - not one of the best teams - would have done the trick. And they didn't even seem to want repromotion...

Jonathan Rogers wrote:And if Barbican "youth" are not hungover?

Haha, good one

Jonathan Rogers wrote:Warwickshire Select also made 0/11 in the first division (in 2003/4), and then they almost won repromotion the following year. A last round win against Kings Head - not one of the best teams - would have done the trick. And they didn't even seem to want repromotion...

I don't understand what you mean here Jonathan.....

Perhaps I'm just being naughty. Malcolm did say at the time that he didn't want the team to go up again, and that he wanted us (Barbican 4NCL 2) to win the last round to ensure that we would go back up instead. But he may well have been joking, or at any rate not speaking for the rest of you!

But, funnily enough a couple of South Wales Dragons players said the same to me that weekend (that we were "welcome" to go up instead of them)- so I wasn't sure whether this was all a joke or not. This was the year when the enormously strong Hilsmark and Slough Sharks were due to go up and it seemed clear that whoever else would go up with them would quite probably finish last (which duly happened - it was indeed to be the strongest first division ever)

Fair enough. I suppose there might be some vague truth in it since, as you kindly mentioned, we had been trashed the year before in div 1 and were a bit nervous about it all happening again. We were by no means even one of the strongest teams in div 2 that year and as I remember were even outgraded by "not one of the best teams" Kings Head in our last round defeat. I don't believe for a second that any of this stopped us trying to win every game though and I remember one of our players winning all 3 of the last weekend's games so desperate was he to be promoted

Ah good, we seem to be at peace then. Remember that my original post was in response to Ben's speculation as to how his team would bounce back from the whitewash of the previous season, and my main point was that WS had bounced back rather well.

It was a bizarre final weekend in 2004/5. We rather underperformed but found ourselves thinking (rightly or wrongly) that all our main rivals seemed to be ambivalent about overtaking us! At the end of it, Wood Green 3 was the team we worried most about, since there was not yet a rule which forbade three teams playing in the same division. Fortunately for us, they just fell short at the end.

Nobody wants a gang war, it's bad for business

Good luck in the coming season....