The tournament was held in the University of Limerick, Ireland from July 28th to 30th.
The playing hall was spacious enough and each nation was assigned a comfortable team room. Nearly everyone enjoyed the hearty Irish food. The residence block was a 15 minute walk away from the playing hall, which could have been awkward in wet weather. Fortunately, this did not happen. F.M. Alexis Harakis accompanied the team and provided much needed encouragement, support and post match analysis.
Unusually, there were eight teams available to play for the Gilbert Cup. So there were two preliminary groups of four to decide the composition of the final groups. (Gilbert A = places 1 to 4, Gilbert B = places 5 to 8.)
The other sections were all-play-all, with England and Ireland each contributing a B team. Our team selection was bedeviled by multiple withdrawals, mainly due to players failing to obtain the necessary visas in time to travel. The Glorney team was the only one not affected.
Consequently, the other three teams were much weakened, with our players ceding a grading advantage of 100 to 400 points. The only exceptions were the Robinson matches against Ireland and Scotland, where the grades were approximately equal. The result of all this was
the worst performance since 2023, and the dark days of Covid 19. The Robinson team ‘s victory over Ireland B was the only match that any Welsh team won. The other three teams were bottom of their section, a long way behind their competitors.
Alexis writes “Many matches were a lot closer than the result suggests. Many games turned later on and one or two draws were agreed in better positions. A number of our players had only started playing competitively in the last couple of years and theinexperience showed.”
As last year, Ireland were the only nation to challenge English supremacy. This year, they went one better and won the Stokes Cup.
Otto Bartlett-Davis was our highest scorer, with a very creditable 3.5 points on Board One.
The final results were as follows:
Glorney
England A 17.5, Ireland A 15.5,
Scotland 12.5, Ireland B11.5,
England B 11.5, Wales 6.5.
Gilbert A
International team 14.5, Ireland A 11,
England B 6, England A 4.5.
Gilbert B
England C 6.5, Ireland 6.5,
Scotland 4, Wales 1.
Robinson
England B 22.5, England A 21,
Ireland 17, Scotland 16,
Wales 8, Ireland B5.5.
Stokes
Ireland A 24.5, England A 23,
England B 14.5, Scotland 13.5,
Ireland B 11, Wales 3.5.
The final scores of our players were:
Glorney
V.Prabhu 1.5,
J.Roberts 0.5,
E.McGrath 2,
D.Shevchenko 1.5,
G.Anandkumar1.
Gilbert
A.Srivastava 0,
Y. Liu 1,
C. Deng 0.5.
Robinson
O. B-Davis 3.5,
A. Jones 1.5,
J.Choung 1,
R. Powell 1,
A. Sarwar 1,
R.Mandadapu 0.
Stokes
H.Burton 0,
J.Are 1,
C.Jones 1.5,
C.Popov 0.5,
T.Gruffydd 0,
L.Gruffydd