The only NCCU team called on to play a ”preliminary” round match was Merseyside. The venue was Room WT0.01, Westwood Teaching Centre, Westwood Campus, KIrby Corner Road, Coventry CV4 8EJ. The arbiter was Mr. Chun Chui who had the match result posted on LMS by 6 o’clock

Merseyside is to be congratulated on a splendid win. Merseyside had a population of about 1,476,000 in 2024 as compared with 1,930,000 for Essex. If the 16 game points at stake were split in the same proportion, then the result would have been 9-7 in favour of Essex. That’s hardly “scientific”, but nevertheless Merseyside might reasonably be seen as beating the “odds”.

Merseyside is now due to meet Hampshire in the ¼-finals on Saturday 9th of May, or on the 10th of May if so mutually agreed. Meanwhile, Yorkshire is due to meet Lincolnshire in the ¼-finals on the same weekend.

Results were as follows.

	Merseyside	10-6	Essex
W	Andrew Korzhov	½-½	Malcolm P Kingsley
B	Thomas Moran	0-1	Ian D Hunnable
W	Terrence Jiang	½-½	James M Robinson
B	Bahkti Vasiev	½-½	Paul R Barclay
W	Phil Owen	1-0	Stephen W Berkley
B	Joe Ledgerton	1-0	Ryan Colclough
W	Phil Ramsey	½-½	Ian P Morgan
B	David CA Colbourne	½-½	Alan E Riddoch
W	Aidan Berry	1-0	Adrian Billingsley
B	Ryan Ng	1-0	Grace Wilde
W	Atharv Jadhav	1-0	Shrishti Shiva
B	Artur Hrabchak	0-1	Ian P Woodward
W	Ben Graham	1-0	Mary Cawdery
B	Sanjoy K Banerjee	1-0	Trevor A Dickerson
W	Daniel Westhead	½-½	David Filer
B	Rob Old	0-1	Shiva Satyanarayan