England Women face uphill battle at Gallipoli

After a slow start, the England team will need some good results to get back into the tournament at Gallipoli. They lost the first match narrowly to France, 14-16. In the second match against the host team Canakkale, played on BBO Vugraph, misfortune struck, resulting in a 7 - 23 defeat. First, the irregular partnership of Heather Dhondy & Sarah Teshome, playing together because both their partners are unavailable on the first day, had a bidding misunderstanding to reach a no play grand slam. Add to that the Canakkale team bid and made two slams against the England team that were worse than 50%, one requiring a finesse and the trumps to be 3-1 or better (45%), the other needing a 3-3 trump break (36%). Despite the misunderstanding, had both the poor slams gone down they would have won the match. Tomorrow Nevena Senior, Heather's regular partner arrives, so hopefully the team will recover.