not been held at all, Anand would still have been a dominant player

The All Blacks avenged their loss in Chicago with a 21-9 win over Ireland at the Aviva Stadium on Saturday.It was a tense affair in which Aaron Smith and Malakai Fekitoa were shown yellow cards, but Ireland were unable to notch any tries in search of back-to-back victories over the world champions.Fekitoa was first to cross for the All Blacks, and a Beauden Barrett try thereafter gave New Zealand a 14-6 lead at half-time, with Johnny Sexton and Paddy Jackson each adding a penalty. Jackson added another to make it a five-point game after the break, but a second try from Fekitoa sealed the win for the All Blacks in Dublin. Conor Murray praises Irelands effort against the All Blacks in a bruising encounter in Dublin It was a frustrating day for Ireland who dominated territory and possession but could not convert a host of half-chances to add to the historic 40-29 win they achieved over New Zealand in the United States a fortnight ago. Ireland boasted 67 per cent possession and 70 per cent territory, but only wound up with three penalty goals to show for it.New Zealand came out of the blocks with furious intent as they retained their kick-off, fought for every ruck and maul and took their chances when they came. The first chance came when Conor Murray miscued his grubber to undermine an excellent Ireland turnover, and the All Blacks pounced.Barretts skimmed crossfield blast dropped sweetly for Fekitoa, who stepped inside Murray and bundled home.The out-of-sorts Aaron Smith threw a wayward pass to hand Ireland a chance next though, then knocking on at a lineout to boost the hosts hand still further. Kieran Read attacks for New Zealand Jamie Heaslip powered over counterpart Kieran Read, and Sean OBrien thundered for the whitewash. The Leinster man surely saw himself scoring - but somehow Barrett hauled him in to hold him off the ground.CJ Stander then linked up with heaslip to get over the line on from the scrum, but was again held up and Ireland opted for pragmatism, with Sexton converting a penalty to trail 7-3.Ireland then lost Robbie Henshaw, wiped out unwittingly by Sam Cane as he spun in a tackle. Sexton was left incredulous that Cane was not hit with more punishment than a simple penalty.Henshaw raised a thumbs-up to the crowd as he departed on a motorised cart, with Leinsters greenhorn Garry Ringrose forced into the number 12 slot for just his second cap.Barrett chipped Irelands line, collected and fired off a no-look pass - but Andrew Trimble read it, and so nearly intercepted for what would have been a canter home. The Ulster wings knock-on denied that attack, but New Zealand were shortly on the scoresheet again. Rory Best says there are positives to take for Ireland in their loss to New Zealand. Barrett ghosted in off a scrum under worryingly little resistance, save Sextons last-gasp tackle that proved in vain.TMO Jon Mason responded in the affirmative when asked by Peyper Can you see grounding on the grass? when it appeared Sexton had rolled Barrett and stopped him dotting down.Scrum-half Aaron Smith then landed New Zealand in further hot water, conceding two quick penalties for offside and was sent to the sin-bin.Johnny Sexton pulled up with a hamstring injury and Paddy Jackson entered the fray, further disrupting Irelands backline. Sexton fails to stop Barrett from scoring Ireland wasted a gilt-edged platform with a cheap offside rolling a maul, then Jackson punted a penalty as the hosts had to settle for a three-point gain from the yellow card.CJ Stander bulldozed Fekitoa, but his night was quickly cut short due to a suspected concussion. The Munster star failed a head injury assessment and did not return, with Josh Van der Flier into the action.Barrett was denied a second try when rightly judged to have knocked on in dislodging the ball from Jacksons grasp, and the game remained finely poised with New Zealand 14-6 ahead at the break.Fekitoa was sin-binned for a high tackle on Simon Zebo, leaving New Zealand down a man for the second time in the match. Steve Hansen praise the character of his All Blacks side following their win against Ireland. Ireland wasted two penalty lineouts, first from a cheap knock-on and then after Van der Flier forced an offload that simply was not on.Jackson fired over a penalty amid yet more Irish pressure, to leave New Zealand leading 14-9 on the hour.Finally Ireland were within one score - but then New Zealand turned it on. Fekitoa eased home thanks to Barretts fine inside-ball offload to TJ Perenara. Referee Peyper immediately awarded the try, much to Irelands fury.Replays suggested Perenaras pass moved forward, but Peyper had few qualms in opting not to call on the TMO despite Bests best efforts to get him to have another look. Cheap Chiefs Jerseys Authentic . PAUL, Minn. Cheap Kansas City Chiefs Jerseys . Goals from Jerome Boateng, Franck Ribery and Thomas Mueller extended Bayerns unbeaten run to a record 37 matches. "This record is incredible," Bayern coach Pep Guardiola said. http://www.cheapchiefsjerseysauthentic.com/ . Parker had 26 points and eight assists and San Antonio beat Toronto 112-99 Monday night. "We won that game because of Tony Parkers aggressiveness," Spurs coach Gregg Popovich said. "His juice; his aggression all night long. Cheap Chiefs Jerseys . Those lessons were more than enough to overwhelm the Utah Jazz. Lou Williams scored 25 points and the Hawks continued their offensive upswing as they rolled to an easy 118-85 victory over the Jazz on Friday night, winning their third straight and for the fourth time in five games. Derrick Thomas Jersey . Paul Pierce couldnt believe he missed at the end. Young scored a season-high 26 points to spark a huge effort from the leagues most productive bench, and Los Angeles beat the Brooklyn Nets 99-94 on Wednesday night after blowing a 27-point lead.On September 29, 2007, in Mexico City, India conquered the world.Seventeen days earlier, eight elite chess players had gathered there to play a gruelling double round-robin tournament. Each player would play all the others twice, once each with white and black. Fourteen rounds against elite opposition. Such super-grandmaster tournaments were common, but this one was special, not just because of the strength of the field assembled but because the winner would be crowned the undisputed world champion of Chess. Therefore, unlike in other tournaments, only first place mattered. There would be blood on this dance floor.At the end of 14 rounds, one man remained unbeaten. Viswanathan Anand of India had ten draws and four wins to his credit, and with nine points out of 14, won the tournament by a full point. Anand, at 37 years of age, was among the older world champions in what was increasingly becoming a young mans game. He was no journeyman, though, but one of the greatest talents in the history of chess, who, as a young prodigy in the late 80s and early 90s, had threatened to be the first man after Bobby Fischer to challenge the Soviet School of Chess. It is impossible to overstate what a monumental achievement this was.***Vladimir Lenin enjoyed playing chess, but institutional support for chess in the Soviet Union had less to do with love of the game and more to do with ideology and geopolitics. Nikolai Krylenko, a senior functionary and the head of the Soviet chess association (until he was purged by Stalin in 1938), once said: We must finish once and for all with the neutrality of chess. We must condemn once and for all the formula chess for the sake of chess, like the formula art for arts sake. We must organize shockbrigades of chess-players, and begin immediate realization of a Five-Year Plan for chess.Chess was taught in schools, and chess players received special dispensation from the regime. In 1927 they even had a world champion in Alexander Alekhine. But Alekhine turned against the Bolsheviks and left for France, whom he represented in the 1930s. It was after World War II that the Soviet School of Chess really took off.One of the imperatives of the Cold War was that the Soviets had to find ways to demonstrate that their vision of the world was superior to that of the capitalist, decadent West. Chess was an obvious domain. Alekhine had died in 1946, but around half of the best players in the world were Soviet. A five-man quintuple round-robin tournament was held in 1948 to decide the World Championship; three of the participants were Soviet. Their chosen man, Mikhail Botvinnik, won easily. Botvinnik became a central figure in the decades-long Soviet domination of chess that followed. Indeed, his work ethic and his values formed the template for the Soviet School.The School placed an emphasis on preparation, both mental and physical. In 1926, the scrawny 15-year-old Botvinnik found himself running out of energy during games, and on his mothers advice, began a daily exercise routine to raise his fitness levels. (Intense concentration at a chess board can take up a surprising amount of energy, and stamina matters.) Physical fitness became a credo for the Soviet School. Far more impressive, though, was the work they put into theoretical preparation.The key skill in chess is not calculation but pattern recognition. A famous study by Adriaan de Groot in 1946 found that grandmasters dont actually calculate more moves ahead than novice players. They just calculate the right ones. This is because what they see on the chessboard is not just a collection of pieces but a collection of existing patterns and possible patterns, all with their own characteristics and weaknesses. The more they study and play the game, the more patterns they understand, with greater depth and subtlety.The Soviet School began training schoolkids in the basic principles of chess, exposing them systematically to an increasing number of patterns, and teaching them basic heuristics to help them deal with common situations. This gave Soviet players an enormous edge over others who did not have this training. Insights that others had to labour to achieve were intuitive for them.?Others such as a kid growing up in India in the 1980s, before the advent of computers, with no access to the kind of information and training that the Soviets had.Devangshu Datta, a writer who played serious chess in the 1980s, and knows Anand well, once told me: When I started playing East Europeans [in the 80s], the difference in chess culture was stark. We knew so much less, it wasnt funny. To take an analogy, it was like putting a bunch of talented kids with a basic knowledge of, say, self-taught HSC level maths into direct competition with people who had post-grad math degrees.Wed struggle through the opening and hit the middle game and start wondering what to do, then in the post-mortem, the opponent would say, Oh, my trainer AN Other taught us that with this structure you have to play this way, and youd be like, Shit.For Anand to come out of this environment and establish himself as an elite player was mind-boggling. He did not have the mental toolkit that Soviet players did, and had to figure it out on the fly. Think of it as playing Wimbledon today with the kind of wooden racket they used 30 years ago; or, as I like to say, taking a Maruti 800 into a Formula One championship and actually competing for the title. What manner of special talent does it take to do that?***Appearances can be deceptive in chess. If you look at Anand, you see a polite, sedately dressed conventional Tamilian gentleman - but his chess style was something apart from this. Think of him as the Viv Richards of chess - flamboyant, attacking, pulling off moves that would leave his opponents in awe. Anand was known in his early days for his creative, attacking play, and he also played quickly, often taking minutes on the clock where others would take more than an hour. He didnt only have attacking strokes in his arsenal, though. He was what is known as a universal player: comfortable in all kinds of positions, with no weaknesses in his game.The chess world that Anand set foot into as a teenager in the late 1980s was a bipolar one - and both the poles were Soviet. Anatoly Karpov, the blue-eyed boy of the Soviet establishment, had become woorld champion in 1975 by default after Bobby Fischer refused to defend his title against him.dddddddddddd (Some say Fischer was scared he would lose to this phenomenal young talent.) Karpov was a positional genius, and his style was likened to that of a boa constrictor, squeezing with precise, quiet moves till there was no life left in his opponent. Garry Kasparov, who beat him for the World Championship in 1985, and in a series of epic matches after that, was an unreal talent. He combined the strong points of every world champion before him, and unlike Anand, his personality matched his playing style: relentlessly attacking, uncompromising, fearless. (He would later battle Vladimir Putin with the same ferocity with which he took down Karpov.) Kasparov was the rebel to Karpovs establishment man persona - but both were solid products of the Soviet school, and both had been personally trained by Botvinnik.Anand won the World Junior Championship in 1987, but his big breakthrough to the elite level came in 1991, when he won a strong super-grandmaster round-robin tournament in Reggio Emilia. He finished ahead of Kasparov (whom he beat with black), Karpov, and upcoming superstars Boris Gelfand and Vassily Ivanchuk. For the first time since Fischer, the domination of the Soviet School of Chess was threatened by an outsider.***Anands quest to be world champion was complicated by a split in the chess world in 1993. Garry Kasparov fought with FIDE, the world chess body, over terms for his World Championship match against Nigel Short, and Kasparov and Short quit to set up a rival association, PCA, with its own World Championship matches. FIDE continued holding World Championships without Kasparov. Anand qualified through a rigorous process to play Kasparov for the PCA world title in 1995. They met in New York, and after eight draws, Anand won the ninth game with a sparkling exchange sacrifice. But Kasparov rebounded ferociously to win four of the next five games to put the match away.Anands next shot was at the FIDE World Championship in 1997-98. Its format was absurd: 97 players would play in a month-long knockout tournament in Groningen in the Netherlands, ending on December 30. And the winner would immediately travel to Lausanne in Switzerland to play a match against a fresh Karpov, who was seeded directly into the final, on January 2. Anand won the knockout tournament, beating Michael Adams in the final match, but was naturally drained by the effort. He later said that he was brought in a coffin to play Karpov, and chess enthusiast Sreenivas Lakkineni was quoted as saying that Anands condition was similar to a runner being asked to immediately start a 100-metre race from the marathon finishing line. To his credit, Anand drew the match 3-3, but lost the Rapid playoff.A couple of years later, in 2000, Anand finally won the FIDE World Championship, triumphing over another 100-man field in a knockout tournament. (Large-field knockout tournaments are very high-variance, so winning two of them within three years was remarkable in itself.) He wasnt the undisputed world champion, though, and craved a shot at that title. The PCA had no qualification system in place, and Kasparov basically picked who he wanted to play. That same year, he overlooked the World No. 2, Anand, and picked fellow Russian Vladimir Kramnik for a World Championship match. To everyones surprise, Kramnik beat Kasparov.The early 2000s were a frustrating time for Anand. He had won one half of the world title, but the other half was held by Kramnik, and Kasparov was still World No. 1. (Anand was No. 2.) Anand won the World Rapid and Blitz titles (players get around 30 minutes each in Rapid and around five minutes each in Blitz) and also won a series of super-GM tournaments. But the chess world was disorganised, and there were no signs of a unified world championship. Kasparov retired in 2005, opting to take on Putin on a larger chessboard. FIDE then got its act together and organised a reunification match between Kramnik and the FIDE world champion at the time, Veselin Topalov. Kramnik won, and was thereby the undisputed champion. And the next year, for the first time since a 37-year-old Mikhail Botvinnik won in 1948, a tournament (instead of a series of knockout matches) was held to decide the new undisputed world champion.***For about four years starting in 2007, Anand played chess as well as anyone has in the games history. He was World No. 1 now, and after winning the title with a solid performance in 2007, he defended it in matches against Kramnik (2008), Topalov (2010) and Gelfand (2012). His play in the matches against Kramnik and Topalov, in particular, was as close to perfection as you can get, according to Datta.He ticked all the boxes during this period, says Datta, and he showed his versatility as well, adapting to his opponents styles. Anand embraced tactical complexity against Kramnik but played with positional finesse against Topalov, practically toying with both men. After all these years of being almost there, he was now regarded as one of the greatest players to have ever played the game. Where does one place Anand in the pantheon of Indian sport? Chess is played in many more countries and by many more people than any other sport that Indians have excelled in, and Anand has been at the pinnacle of the game for two and a half decades. By this reckoning, he is incomparable. And his 2007 world title has special meaning.Had the world championships never been unified, indeed had they not been held at all, Anand would still have been a dominant player and perhaps played games of the same quality. But sporting greatness is not just about how well you play the game in a vacuum, but how well you play it under pressure. Context matters. With his lifetimes dream within his grasp, to display the solidity he showed in 2007, and then the versatility (and mastery of his opponents) he did in the subsequent matches against Kramnik and Topalov, was extraordinary - and so very unlikely. A soft-spoken Tamilian boy from India taking down the Soviet School of Chess? Whod have thunk it?Amit Varma is a writer based in Mumbai. He writes the blog India Uncut. Twitter: @amitvarma. ' ' '