UK Youth Beat Turkey 5-0

Our UK youth Go squad has played the first round of the European Youth Go Team Competition and won 5-0 against Turkey. The round was meant to be played on Saturday 11th November, but as this clashed with the UK youth championship Turkey kindly agreed to play the games early.

Our team for this round comprised Scott Cobbold, Alvina Kwok, Michael Mitcham-Harding, Ryan Zhang and Yanyi Xiong. We were expecting to win on the first three boards, as the grades were in our favour and our players duly delivered. Our board 5 Yanyi was facing a tough game against a 1 kyu. He did well to punish some mistakes by his opponent and capture a group and then stayed calm and played safely in the remainder of his game to pick up a good win. Ryan's match was the last to be played and on paper was evenly matched, but Ryan was able to take a convincing win cementing the 5-0 result.

Our squad for this year again shows the increasing strength of our young players with competition for places in the U16 age group being particularly competitive. We welcomed six new faces to the squad this year for the first time: Michael Mitcham-Harding, Alain Cheung and Alvina Kwok in the U16 and Audrey Fung, Blake Shamoon and Aidan Fung in the U12 age group. We also welcomed back Ryan Zhang in the U12, at a considerably stronger grade than when he was last in the squad three years ago.

The full UK youth squad for this season is listed on our EYGTC page.