Extra A 94 v Bury St Edmunds 3s 0

The Extra A kicked off their season with a friendly at home against Bury St Edmunds 3rd team on Saturday, with conditions perfect for a running game of Rugby. With our 1st team and Blues squads both playing against BSE in seemingly competitive matches, we had hoped that the ability levels would be similar in the 3rd tier; as the scoreline suggests, this was not the case.

Bury kicked off into the breeze and, almost immediately, the Extra A had scored their first of the day after Steve Green showed his skills from 12 to go through the middle and give a well timed final pass to set up the opening try of the season. Stortford ran riot for the next few minutes with line breaks coming from most players, but number 8 Oli Jones particularly stood out as a danger man in open play. By the time we had scored our fifth try, the game was only 15 minutes old and I was already hearing proposals of a shorter game from the referee. The half continued in the same vein, and the half time whistle went on the 30 minute mark with the Extra A around 60-0 up.

The aim of the second half was to a) not concede and b) to ensure our lineout was functioning well. This was put into practice several times by our pack, with John Carter soaring to collect the accurate arrows of hooker Will Moore and set up several effective driving mauls, giving Arran Mahoney a good platform to release the outside backs. We scored several more tries off the back of this and managed to achieve both of our goals when the final whistle came (10 mins early, again).

Although this was somewhat of a mismatch, it was not a worthless task and we managed to play some really good Rugby and execute some slick moves. We have a 'friendly' next week against Hertford 3s which will provide a much sterner test and give us a much better indication of where we are as a team. There were several candidates for man of the match, with Steve Green, Will Moore, Tom Roche and Alex Wilson all stating a strong case, but we could not look past the 4 tries and countess line-breaks made by number 8 Oli Jones. As is always the case with the Extra A, there were just as many candidates for the coveted d*ck of the day award; Alex Walsh (shock) for stopping when clean through, and Sperm (double shock) for a ridiculous attempted offload surely would have taken it, but with the final kick of the game found redemption with a drop kicked conversion from wide out on the right. As if I wasn't going to mention it. The winner however was Dave 'the wall' Macfie, for subbing himself without prompt from anyone.

Please see below an inaccurate list of try scorers, I know it is wrong because if its right then I kicked 12/14 conversions, and i remember missing at least 3. One person that is missing, is Andrew Mackenzie, who still didn't score in a 94-0 victory:

Oli Jones- 4
Tom Roche- 2
Alex Banjac- 1
Arran Mahoney- 1
Ben Baker- 1
Ross Johnstone- 1
Alex Walsh- 1
Steve Green- 1
Mike Roberts- 1
Sperm-1