A point to prove?

I guess New Year's greetings are old news now, so onto round 4 and another opportunity to trade rating points for a little dignity, up against Michael Ridge (178/1841). The pairing gods gave me a double black, and the database gods weren't in a much kinder mood since my preparation went as far as my first move.

For a short draw, this game had plenty of twists and turns largely arising from me not being sure whether to play too meekly or too ambitiously. I had a fling with both and was fortunate that White knew exactly what he was after:

So the unremitting drabness continued, and it seems fitting that even this one non-Sicilian of the tournament was a mirror image. Whilst I played fairly well in the early middlegame to bring my position to life, I just couldn't keep a level head in this game. I managed to dismiss an early ...d5 as anti-positional and to cower in my defence of e5, whilst also going to any lengths to avoid trading a bishop for a mere knight and then launching that one-dimensional attack at the end. Which was the real me?

Maybe they were all symptoms of a lack of confidence. When everything flows you don't normally need to try too hard, but I can certainly see parallels with this game. Cautiously volunteering ...d6 and preferring the less committal ...Bb4 lines can easily be pinned on doubt, but so can stubbornly holding onto my bishops and then getting primitive with ...f5 and ...Rf6. In the former case I didn't want the burden of proving that White's bishop pair was unimportant; in the latter I was under pressure to justify declining a draw (and to continue the 'natural' course of events after equalising).

The next rounds of the 4NCL are this weekend as I type, and going into them on the back of this game would be bad enough. But there was one round to go, and a further low to finish off.