TAT successfully sails through stormy seas

Last season the QUB B team won the Division 2 title, but “artistic differences” between the team members and QUB supremo, Chris Millar saw the second-tier champions cast adrift and enter the top league as The Away Team, having gathered a few “reinforcements” along the way. Not the most inspired of name choices but the acronym TAT seemed to sum up well this rag-tag bunch under Captain “Beard” (think here of “The Caine Mutiny”).

With their top-rated player only at 1800 the little frigate TAT was always going to find it difficult against the big battleships of QUB, Fisherwick and RVH. A relegation battle with Lagan, long-time experts in avoiding the drop, was on the cards. And so it proved.

Going into the final round of scheduled fixtures this week, TAT was leading Lagan by 2 points with the two teams due to face each other at the Boat Club on Wednesday. However, both teams had postponed games against Fisherwick, and first TAT shared the spoils with an under strength Fisherwick on Monday night.

This now put TAT 5.5 points ahead of Lagan, going in to their Wednesday night encounter. If TAT could win the match, then Lagan could not catch them, whatever the riversiders did in their postponed match with Fisherwick. However, if Lagan could win, then the most they would have to do to stay up would be to draw against Fisherwick.

For much of the three-hour battle, it was too close to call. Board 1 was always a careful manoeuvring encounter between Lagan captain Jonathan Brown and Danny Mallaghan and was the first game to finish. A half-point each. On board five "the Sultan”, despite a valiant rearguard action eventually had to surrender to Peter May, rated only 32 points lower than TAT’s top board. Cal Leitch, only able to play because he had been marooned in Belfast because of the Icelandic volcanic ash cloud (and according to Beard unable to travel by boat to England because he suffers from sea-sickness ?!?), always held the initiative despite Sam Moore’s efforts to drain all the pieces off the board, but in the end even a risky exchange sacrifice by Leitch couldn’t prevent a classic Moore draw. With the score 2-1 in favour of Lagan, attention turned to boards 2 and 3 where the TAT players had both been under heavy bombardment. Now with about 10 minutes of the session to go, Des Moreland (apparently recruited late in the season because his captain believed him to have a “double o” like that other famous naval man James Bond) seemed to have weathered the storm and although he had double isolated e-pawns, they seemed to give his pieces more open lines and he secured a winning endgame. 2-2. On board 2, Damien Lavery had ventured the obscure gambit 1 d4 Nf6 2 g4 and had spent most of the game doing some desperate ducking and diving (but he’s good at that – experience aplenty). After spending all game avoiding William Collins’ depth-charges, Lavery finally launched a torpedo to sink his opponent amidships. 3-2 and finally the good ship TAT could sail back into its summer harbour safe and sound.

The Away Team	vs	Lagan
Danny Mallaghan	0.5-0.5	Jonathan Brown
Damien Lavery	1-0	William Collins
Des Moreland	1-0	Tom Esmonde
Calum Leitch	0.5-0.5	Sam Moore
John McKenna	0-1	Peter May

But where was the TAT captain during the final week’s events? In the brig? Will the mutineers be court-martialled despite their heroic efforts?