England Defeat Australia 2.5-1.5 In Commonwealth Clash
Round five of the 2024 FIDE Olympiad saw another close shave between Australia and a titan of the chess world, England. It's been 20 years since Australia played England in an Olympiad and last time the score was 2-2. Amazingly, two players from each team: GMs Zong-Yuan Zhao and David Smerdon as well as GMs Michael Adams and Luke McShane are playing for their countries two decades on.
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Australia headed into this match as the rating underdogs and as a team of unpaid players compared to England who are considered professionals.
Before the game, top Papua New Guinean arbiter Shaun Press (Shaun lives in Australia and we claim him as ours) approached me and joked that since the Aus-Eng cricket match was washed out the chess would determine who would "take home the ashes." English arbiter Alex Holowczak would later ask on Facebook if we could "burn the spare queens, and put the dust in a little urn to give to the Australian captain as a souvenir."
Unfortunately for us, after four hours of play it became clear that even if there was an urn, we wouldn't be the ones taking it home. IM Rishi Sardana played creative chess against the eight-time British champion GM Michael Adams from the black side of the Sicilian Najdorf but fell a tempi or two short of chasing Adams' king to the middle of the board and checkmating him. Not believing in Rishi's plan, Adams ended up flipping the script and checkmated Rishi on move 41.
On board one GM Temur Kuybokarov drew with former super-GM Nikita Vitiugov with 98.4 accuracy. The greatest edge that arose during the game was in favor of Temur on move 23 however this was only a -0.54 advantage, meaning Vitiugov was able to equalize soon after.
With the scores poised at 1.5-0.5 in favor of England, GM David Howell offered our GM Bobby Cheng a draw on board two but Bobby was keen to take down his second 2650+ opponent of the event and did exactly that.
This was a classic case of the grinder becoming the ground and clinical endgame play eventually secured the result in favor of Bobby.
While Cheng-Howell was coming to a head, GM Zong-Yuan Zhao was battling for his life against GM Gawain Jones but in the end, Jones' positional understanding in the King's Indian Defense prevailed.
2.5-1.5 is not a bad score against England considering the 100-point average rating gap however losing to the old enemy does sting. In round six we will take on a Kyrgyzstan outfit and the country has a well-rounded team. In the 2020 FIDE Online Olympiad, our six-board team was held to a draw by Kyrgyzstan so we are taking this match seriously.
Our women's team scored a 2.5-1.5 win over Costa Rica which nearly gave captain and IM Mihajlo Radovanovic "a heart attack" due to the swinging evaluation on all boards. In round six the women's team will play Israel, who are led by 2408-rated IM Marsel Efroimski.
