Peggy Bayer 2025 - Sunday #2

With just two matches to go things are looking tight. We are still in fourth place, but rather than trying to catch up with Ireland we are now looking over our shoulder at Northern Ireland. The last two matches are tough ones - against EBU and against Ireland.

Lunch today was similar to yesterday, various sandwiches and some chips for the fussy eaters. One of my team said all of the sandwiches were weird because they had salad and/or tomatoes in them. Admittedly, there was one today with a strange paste I couldn't identify.

Front of the queue for lunch

I have encouraged the youngsters to be healthy and go out for walks. Yesterday two of them managed to get out of the hotel, but only for the purpose of walking to Greggs (they got lost and never got a yum-yum). The Irish team just go outside to vape and the Welsh have obviously not read the same books as I have about ultra-processed foods. Their captains have brought an enormous amount of snacks, which are constantly pushed on their team. "Monster Munch! Take a bag, we've got all the flavours". "Bubble-gum sweets are quite good in the morning!"

Here is a hand from our 20-0 drubbing from the EBU team. 

It's the only type of hand where we tend to gain on against England, where they bid to an unmakeable slam. 6H from East has two top losers, and not enough tricks even if you get a friendly lead. Our South lead the King of Clubs and gave it no chance.

So we were briefly 11 IMPs up, as our East-West pair stayed safely in game. But then came a barrage of missed games. Most of them we should have been in too, some we should have defended better. But here is one more gain:

Against 3NT, our South lead the Ace of Diamonds. Presumably they took three more Diamond tricks. Then declarer ends up taking a Spade finesse and going down. On the other table we stopped in 2S=, which was worth 5 IMPs but maybe a moral loss as you probably want to be in 3NT.