I’ll raise the level of chess in Kenya, says Long
By Gibo Zachary, August 4, 2020
Kenya’s chess coach Peter Long says he is not disappointed with the performance of national chess team despite being bundled out of the ongoing International Chess Federation (FIDE) Online Olympiad 2020.
Kenya failed to advance to Division Three after finishing sixth in Pool A that had 10 countries, where the top three countries qualified and the Malaysian international said that Kenya’s performance was well within their abilities and much more needs to be done to raise the standards going forward.
“Kenya’s performance was exactly to its ranking. Despite the online games not being the same as over the board play, we were not expected to qualify to the next stage as a few teams that we faced were too far ahead of us in terms of rankings and quality,” Long told People Sport.
Long was, however, impressed with some individual display, adding that had all players put in their best, Kenya could have finished in a high position in the pool.
He cited poor network connectivity as another contributing factor in Kenya’s loss.
“We could have won two more matches but I think after the loss to Nepal on the second day, the morale went down ending our very slim chances of qualifying.
But to be fair, a few games were lost to technical issues, for example loss of connectivity,” he said.
Long said that after the results against Nepal, they made a decision to expose all the selected players and give them an opportunity to have a feel of what the games demand of them in the upcoming assignments.