Report by John Auld

Captain Lloyd and partner slipped off to the Costa del Sol for this match and left me in charge. To be fair I had a fully selected line-up and even some reserves "in the unlikely event that someone drops out". Needless to say illness struck and thanks are due to Frank Ball for stepping in at short notice.

The teams:

Dawes: William Crook and Sandy Fulton; David Hodge and Mark Goddard; David Burgess and Gordon Fullerton; Irene and John Auld

Porter: Graham Lee and Graham Brindley; Martin Mellor and Sylvia Goodlud ; Frank Ball and Nick Clarke; Ray Furlonger and Phil Dale

Markham: Daphne and Mike Coggles; Fay Kirk and Roger Staton; Tim Anderson and Bernard Scanlon; Chris and Dorothy Close

Things started well in the first half with the Dawes and Porter teams each +15 and the Markham trailing by just 9.

The Dawes team were helped by Gordon Fullerton`s play on board 2: 

A spade was led and Gordon cashed another noting North`s heart discard. Searching anxiously for signs of nine tricks he now made a great play of a club to the nine followed by J of spades won by South who exited with another spade. With 8 tricks in the bag Gordon cashed two clubs before putting South on play again with the 8 of spades. AK of hearts were cashed but then a diamond led perforce: having come this far Gordon was not going to go wrong and the Q of diamonds was trick nine. 

My partner earned us a nice swing in the bidding on board 16 whilst affording me the opportunity to make one less trick in the play than everyone else:

Not everyone responded on the South hand but as so often bidding paid.

The play looks like a text book example of retaining trump control. After two rounds of diamonds the only problem may be a bad trump break. A routine counter to a forcing game is to discard a losing spade on one of the opponent`s diamond tricks. However it is not enough to play Ace and another heart lest someone ducks with Kxxx of trumps. That fixes you because if you continue hearts you cannot resist further diamonds. The correct play (I believe ) is a low trump at trick 3 and if that wins another  low heart. Now you can discard a spade on the next diamond and ruff further leads in dummy.

Thus it came to pass that I led a small trump to West`s singleton K at trick 3; at least I remembered to discard a spade at trick 4 and scored +420.

The good work in the Dawes was massively undone in the second half with some nightmare defences and self inflicted -800s. We slumped to -50 imps  (3-17 VPs) and the Porter team also lost (-33 or 5-15). Credit goes to the Markham team who achieved a winning draw (+2 ,10-10 VPs).