All over for us, but not everyone

Ups and downs in Brighton. We failed to make either of the finals but we did finish sixth in the tertiary event (Brighton Bowl), just beating our performance the last time we played with Micky.

We did not deserve to be in a final, all of us making too many mistakes. Two fairly flat matches in the middle of Saturday also made our life difficult, so we journeyed through and were 10 VPs above average most of the time. A big win in our final match on Saturday evening would have done the job and, although there was a big win, it was not in our favour.

I find it difficult to play on the Sunday afternoon but we got three big wins from four matches to move up the field. There were some positives from the weekend. Alex and I had changed quite a bit of our system and we did not have forgets or mistakes. Just need to fix the judgement now. We defended reasonably well and did well in the slam zone, even if they did not all make at least they were good contracts.

Scottish performances:

• Mike Ash, Irving Gordon, Christopher Chambers*, Peter Gemmell*  were 5th in the A final.
• Jenny Cooper, with Tim Rees* and two others finished 5th in the B final
• Brian Spears, Paul Barton, Helen and Danny Kane finished 8th in the B final
• Anna St Clair, Dee Harley, Anthony Bates, Robert Clow were 15th in the Brighton Bowl
• Jim Forsyth, Cathy Ferguson, Paul Maiolani, Bob McKinnon were also 15th 
• Fiona Greenwood, with three others, was 32nd 
• Tim McKay, Keith Youngs,  Antony Whiteway,  Andrew Symons were 33rd
• Nigel Guthrie, with three others, was 61st
• Rob Dixon, with three others, was 70th
• Martin Craven, with three others, was 106th

Meanwhile, over in Lille, the Scots have been playing mixed teams. None of them were able to make the top eight and the knock-out stages and, looking at the final table after fifteen rounds of Swiss, seemed to be converging on a similar score. However, it has to be said that the teams were not necessarily approaching these scores from the same direction!

You might think that bridge is now over for them, but apparently there is three days of BAM available although I'm not sure how many will avail themselves of this 'opportunity'.

Meanwhile Memphis Mojo is still going strong in the Transnational Mixed Teams and, as I type, his team (Spring) is 5 imps behind in the quarter-final with 13 boards to go.

Update: unfortunately for Dave the set slipped away from the Sprung team and they lost by just twelve imps over 48 boards.