We all arrived safely yesterday and reached a sunny Belgium. Obviously, we start with high expectations.

The England Open team have just completed day one of eleven with mixed success that leaves us just above average after the first four matches.

We started slowly against Spain and suffered three large swings out on consecutive boards that we couldn’t recover from, eventually losing 36-54.

We recovered well in the second match against Romania and despite mainly flat boards, two slam swings in helped us to a 27-15 win.

In the third match against Hungary we played well and had much the better of the game boards but success for Hungary in the partscore zone towards the end of the match held us to a 39-29 win.

In the final match of today we played our first match against one of the stronger teams in Ireland and a relatively flat match was decided by a few big swings. Whilst we were a little lucky in bidding a slam that could have gone off on a different lead we were also unlucky going for 800 having opened a weak 2 diamonds on AJT8xxx and a side king. The final result was 23-18 to us.

The best bit of play from the team during the day saw Artur play a 4H contract very nicely to make it on an endplay. The team are in good spirits and looking to push up the table tomorrow with games against Estonia, Austria and Poland.

Neil