For years Battersea’s attention has been focused north – to the big city leagues in Zone 1. The club fielded a record seven teams this season in the London Chess League and three more in the Central London League.
But for the first time in our history, this year Battersea took the opportunity to enter a league that readers may not have heard of, the Croydon & District League.
After all, the entry cost for the C&D is just £5 and the league’s third division, the Dave Luckin Trophy, is only a 4-board competition. So why not? Also, it’s always easy to organise just four players, right?
The C&D bills itself as “a small and friendly league for chess teams in South London” but while unassuming, unassuming, the C&D traces its history back to 1920 – so it’s certainly not new.
Also, the league is largely run by two friends of the club, Richard Tillett (from Streatham & Brixton CC) and Martin Stewart (from Lewisham CC). Both are prodigious organisers.
Going south is also not new for Battersea – the club was an early member of the Surrey Chess League which it won for the first time in 1895, 10 years after foundation.
The Surrey League and the C&D are closely linked and almost like a big brother (or sister) and a little brother (or sister). All the other clubs in the C&D also compete in the Surrey League and, like Battersea, are members of the Surrey County Chess Association.
However, while Battersea remained affiliated to the SCCA it hasn’t actually competed in the Surrey League for more than a decade. Battersea last entered the league’s knockout competition, the Alexander Cup, in 2019 when we narrowly lost 5.5-4.5 in the first round to Guildford. We fielded a Grandmaster that day in our friend the Ginger GM Simon Williams and we still lost. It was painful.
The question of whether we should re-enter the Surrey contests comes up every year at our AGM and the main reason for ducking out has been our members’ unwillingness to travel down south for evening matches, often after work.
It’s understandable. With public transport more sparse as London peters out, when a club isn’t near a train station it can be tough to get to. A car is often essential and coordination between teammates is needed. That puts people off so, the argument goes, we can’t guarantee we’ll fulfill our away fixtures.
This season, after being invited in January to enter the C&D as the league decided to restart after covid lockdowns, we decided to test the waters of this theory.
Would our members, starved of league chess over the pandemic, be willing to travel to West Wickham on a cold Tuesday night? We were about to find out.
Six months later, we have the answer: we weren’t wrong, it is difficult to get a team together willing to go south, and, unfortunately, as a consequence, our results also went south.
We quickly found out that the rating restriction in the division means finding the right balance of players can be tricky. Board 1, ideally, needs to be rated above 1750 ECF and board 2 needs to be ready to face an opponent at similar strength.
Meet Shah, a new member this season, took the board 1 role and scored an impressive 2/2. But when Meet wasn’t available we struggled to convince anyone to take his place.
Battersea’s new team lost its first match against a very strong Coulsdon C side before winning the next two against South Norwood C and Wallington.
Those wins were convincing, but then a loss at home to Lewisham and a keenly-fought draw against HMRC Croydon derailed any hopes of winning the division.
Finally, the team couldn’t muster enough players to play its away match against West Wickham – exactly what we feared when entering the league – and had to concede a default, which meant a 4-0 loss.
The fixtures for the division are not yet completed, but already Coulsdon has secured the title. Six wins out of six made sure of that. Coulsdon is a behemoth in the Surrey area and an extremely well-run club, so that is no surprise.
Battersea will finish mid-table with a respectable points total in its first outing in the Croydon & District League.
We have dipped our toe into the competition, and whether we enter again depends on if members at the AGM think there’s the appetite to go south again.
