Legal V Commercial

Match report Legal

After this match was postponed earlier, we were all glad to benefit once again from the generous hospitality of Simmons and Simmons, which is always appreciated. This was a closer match than the scoreline might suggest, with a lot of closely contested games, albeit that most of them went Legal’s way in the end. Apart from a lot of good games, unexpected points of interest during the evening included: (1) a fire false alarm announcement, which caused several of the doors to lock automatically and meant that a few of us had to find a slightly more circuitous way out of the building afterwards; and (2) in a time scramble in the last game to finish on top board, a defending bishop inadvertently changed colour from white-squared to black-squared, which would have turned a difficult position to win into a definite draw – fortunately this entertaining mistake was corrected immediately, and a very good game, played in good spirit, proceeded to its conclusion. The match and atmosphere was good-natured all round, as has always been the way with Bronowski matches. -- Steven Coles

Daniel Lindner

Controller comment

Commercial entered the competition and played one fixture, which resulted in Legal 9½-2½ Commercial, but having failed to respond to the attempts of Banks and Insurance to arrange their fixtures, the Controller’s decision is that Commercial’s single result is excluded from the 2011-12 competition and the results between the other three teams decide the Bronowski Trophy for this Season. It should be noted that two other options were available to the Controller, but neither would alter the outcome in anything other than detail. These options were: i) to regard the unplayed matches as having been constructively defaulted by Commercial due to their failure to respond to Banks and Insurance, the latter two teams each being awarded the minimum of 8 Game Points; ii) the unplayed matches to be declared null. In each case, the result of the Competition and the placing of teams would have been the same. The games of the Legal-Commercial match, which was played, were submitted for grading and the match is recorded on this page to show the results as played. -- Ian Hunnable

Daniel Lindner