Devon 1st team were in action on Saturday 13th June 2026, playing against Cambridgeshire for a place in the Minor Counties Final. Jon Underwood provides a report of the day.
It was a pretty exciting match with the lead swinging backwards and forwards throughout - at least until the final quarter of an hour.
When I first saw their team I thought we had a respectable chance to win the match. They did outgrade us by hefty margins on the top three boards but the rest looked balanced; perhaps we even had a slight edge.
Our opponents quickly ran up two wins, until John scored our first (half) point with a draw to leave the score 0.5-2.5. Shreyas and Chris Bellers struck back around the mid point to level the match.
There followed an exchange of point with Trefor scoring our win and a draw from Charlie to put the score to 4 all. Mark then scored a fine win against his higher rated opponent - Devon led by 5-4.
Unfortunately from a Devon point of view the last 7 points only contributed draws from Chris Archer-Lock and Alan, with Cambridgeshire winning all the remaining five games including the three top boards, where they outrated us by a combined 600 points. In the end we went down 6-10.
Devon v Cambridgeshire in the ECF League Management System has the full scoresheet.
