Leicestershire were represented by an U18, U11, 2 U11 Girls Teams and an U9 team at the recent 4 Counties Invitational at Kenilworth School against Warwickshire, Oxfordshire and Northamptonshire.
The U11 team finished a fine 2nd to Oxfordshire with wins against both Warwickshire and Northants. Arooj Mahajan and Arav Ajaykumar both won all 3 games with Madhav Eradi scoring well with 2 wins and a draw.
In the U11 Girls, Northants were unable to field a team so Leicestershire chose to enter 2 relatively evenly balanced teams to give more players an opportunity to play at this level. A single Leicestershire might well have won the competition but even with a reduced strength ‘A’ team Leicester tied with Oxfordshire in 2nd on match points only just losing out on Tiebreak with game points. Lindsay Pyun was very dominant on board 1 winning all 3 games and Sophie Mehta on board 1 for the ‘B’ team had good claim to be the 2nd best U11 girl player in the competition given that she won 2 games apart from her loss against Lindsay.
In the U18s, Leicestershire drew with Northants (4-4) ond only narrowly lost to Oxfordshire 4.5-3.5 to finish in 3rd position. Sasha Kerbel had a notable competition with 2 wins and a draw in his 3 games.
In the U9s, the entire team were making their county team debuts as practically all last year’s successful U9 team have moved up to the U11 category. Consequently it was always going to be a tough competition for the new team as they were facing two very strong teams from Warwickshire (Northants didn’t enter a team) and one from Oxfordshire. To put it in perspective, in 2018 Warwickshire where 4th nationally and Oxfordshire 6th. The team finished as expected in 4th place but I’m sure will build on this as the year progresses.