14a match report against Bishops

The U14A team went into the game against arch rivals Bishops with high expectations and a point to prove. To a large extent their goals were accomplished, but the performance was far from a perfect one.

Unfortunately we are making a habit of starting badly and again failed to buck the trend on Saturday. A poor kickoff resulted in a scrum that Bishops ultimately scored from through some poor man-on-man defence. Bishops ran into an early 7 – 0 lead. As we settled into our playing style and pattern we began to make inroads, however our reluctance to ‘earn the right to go wide’ meant that we struggled to break down their defence. It was from a poor kick that we scored our first try with Jason Weber crashing over after some good interplay between the back three. The try gave us the ascendancy and we hardly looked back all match, barring a brief five minute period at the start of the second half, scoring another shortly before half time after some committed work from the forward pack. We led 15 – 7 at half-time adding a penalty before the whistle.

Bishops started the second half with confidence and were duly rewarded after some poor tackling again resulted in a try off a simple penalty tap. We refused to allow the try to dent our confidence and roared straight back with two excellent tries from Matthew Venier. Our forwards began to exert their dominance on proceeding and as the game wore on we really should have added a few more points to the overall final score. Ultimately we only scored one more try through Ian Paterson after some good patient defensive work resulted in a turnover which was quickly exploited by the no 7 flanker. The final score was 34 – 14 and we were able to celebrate a good win.

The boys can be proud of their overall performance, but need to realise the opposition will only be getting stronger and they will have to continue to improve week in week out to stay ahead of their opponents.