Ed Howlett Fernwood Sword Club
Ed produced some excellent performances this week as he stepped up to fencing's equivalent of the Champions League.
He started with the individual competition on Tuesday. He was unfortunate to start off by being in a genuine contender for a poule of death. With 13 poules, he had 1 fencer who ended up with a bronze medal, another in L8 and another in L16. He started with a 3-5 loss to Italian, Federico Pistorio and might well have done better had he fenced him later in the poule. He confidently beat Portuguese fencer Pedro Tomas 5-1. A 2-5 defeat to bronze medallist, Frenchman Noe Robin was a fair result. Ed scrapped well to win 5-3 against awkward Swede Carl Berggren, who caused equal difficulties to all the fencers in the poule. A 1-5 defeat to Germany's Keram Ercan (the poule's top seed), simply did not reflect the quality of Ed's fencing, with 2 calls inexplicably going against Ed. His final fight against against Ukrainian Danyyl Hoyda was equally frustrating, with the same referee failng to weight test Hoyda's foil on a change - Ed had to remind him to do so and Hoyda's foil failed. Ed was distracted by all this and a final challenging decision meant he lost 4-5. Ed's performance didn't merit V2D4. But he had to get on with it. He faced Maxim Skopets of Ukraine in his L128. Having started brightly to lead 2-0 Ed then got into an attritional battle. At 10-12 down he came alive with great style, scoring 5 straight single light hits to win 15-12. Given his seeding he then faced World no. 4 Vladimir Mylnikov of Russia in L64. Mylnikov took an early lead to make it 4-1, but Ed fought back to make it 5-5. At this stage the top fencers tend to step up and make the fight theirs, but Ed managed to keep Mylnikov down to a 2 hit lead, till Mylnikov went 11-8 up. Ed's head didn't go down and he fought back to make it 11-12, then 12-13. Mylnikov got a crucial hit just before the break and then finished off the fight in the second period to make it 15-12. The quality of the fencing was worthy of a L16 fight and, to put it into perspective, Mylnikov went on to win his L32 fight 15-1 and finished 6th overall. Ed may have lost, but he went out on a very high note.
The men's foil team fenced on Friday. It was a tough day. GB received a bye to L16. In their L16 fight against Roumania, GB lost 45-37. Ed kicked off with a 5-5 draw against 8th world ranked Alexandru Pirva, which was commendable. He started off well against 6th world ranked Silviu Rosu but lost the match. He also lost to Alexandru Sirb, which was disappointing. Ed had beaten both these fencers in the team competition at Moedling, but they came with a plan. One of Ed's team mates won all his matches and the other lost all his. This meant GB were fighting for a placing within L16. Ed was an unused reserve against Ukraine and GB unfortunately lost 45-39. The team then fenced brilliantly against a competitive Israel team, with a 45-22 win. Ed kicked off with a fine 5-2 win against Raz Goren who made L32 in the individual, then stylishly beat Hadar Balzam 5-0, finishing 6-3 against Omar Orel Talmon. GB's final match was against a tough Hungary side. Ed matched Matyas Maior 5-5 (19th in the individuals) and lost 4-5 to the very competent left hander Gergo Szemes, against whom he'd struggled in a DE at Budapest, so this was a pleasing improvement. GB were 23-25 down at this point. Ed was then subbed for his last match, with the team ending overall with a 40-45 defeat.
While Ed had an unlucky draw in the poule and unhappy experiences with one of the two referees in his poule, he came away pleased with many aspects of his overall performance in the individual competition, if not satisfied by the final result. The team competition proved to be useful experience, with Ed very much holding his own except in two of the matches against Roumania.
Ed fences for GB in the World Cadet Championships in Plovdiv on 2nd April.
In other news, the GB senior men's foil rankings are now out for March and Ed has gone up to an impressive 27th, his highest ever placing. The "value" of a fencer is attributed in the September and March rankings. 11th to 30th ranked fencers bring 6 NIF points to a competition if they fence in it, so Ed goes up from 3 points to 6.
The attached photo is the GB team - from the European Fencing Confederation Facebook page, courtesy of Augusto Bizzi.