English Chess Forum

Neil Graham wrote:

David Blower wrote:It is actually my target that we do get full teams out, and I think it is realistic.

Staffordshire Under 140 have withdrawn today.

Harumph. *deletes fixture from calendar*

Neil Graham wrote:

David Blower wrote:It is actually my target that we do get full teams out, and I think it is realistic.

Staffordshire Under 140 have withdrawn today.

MCCU website notes

Staffs withdraw from u140 team tournament
21 Sep, Peter Sherlock reports. Staffordshire have reluctantly concluded they have insufficient players to firld a u140 team this season.

Ok, much better than defaulting matches that have been arranged and venues paid for, but still a puzzle why they entered in the first place - having acquired a captain, I'd have thought a big county like Staffs could find enough players

Pity

Mick Norris wrote:

Neil Graham wrote:

David Blower wrote:It is actually my target that we do get full teams out, and I think it is realistic.

Staffordshire Under 140 have withdrawn today.

MCCU website notes

Staffs withdraw from u140 team tournament
21 Sep, Peter Sherlock reports. Staffordshire have reluctantly concluded they have insufficient players to firld a u140 team this season.

Ok, much better than defaulting matches that have been arranged and venues paid for, but still a puzzle why they entered in the first place - having acquired a captain, I'd have thought a big county like Staffs could find enough players

Pity

A sad irony that we seem to have a team but no captain for some teams and a captain but no team for others

Well, the obvious solution would be to move the captain over to the team?

Mick Norris wrote:Well, the obvious solution would be to move the captain over to the team?

Simples

Not always quite so simple with grade limited teams of course

How about a radical change to the rules to allow players from counties without a team in their grading section to play for an adjoining county?

This would allow, for example, MC level players in Derbyshire to play for Notts (or Yorks, Leics, Staffs)

You do have to be subtly careful about that sort of thing - very logical in chess terms, but you can easily end up mislaying the thing that makes County chess worth doing.

MartinCarpenter wrote:You do have to be subtly careful about that sort of thing

Well, yes Still, if you did this then it wouldn't quite be county chess any more would it? The 4NCL model might be objectively quite a bit better but its also something we already have one of!

The MCCU could actually (I believe) do it for the qualifying stages of the competition if you wanted, you'd just have to be sure that the places could still field a team if/when they qualified for the knock out stages.