Great competitive game, but unable to win the forward battle

Following the debarcle the week before and the loss of our fly half to an ankle injury, we travelled (unusual for us!) to Biggleswade to play another top team in the table. We made good time, and this time had a good warm up, seemingly everything going very smoothly upto kick off! They won the toss, chose the end and we chose to kick.

Tubsy, starting at 10 in the absence of Lippi ‘kicked’ off, and the ball fizzled about 4 metres forward from our pack, leading to a restarted scrum in the middle of the pitch which they won and ran it hard with well practiced lines through their centres, rucking over it quickly to free up the ball and then 2 phases of narrow forward attacks before spinning it out to the centres for more of the same cycle. This essentially set the tone for the match as their forwards did play very well, and largely kept the ball in the Biggleswade team for 60 mins of the game.

However this attacking play from Biggleswade was met by the most spirited and aggressive defence I have seen from a Stortford team in a very long time. Particularly strong defence that caught my eye came from Andrew Dewhurst, Jerry, Josh Prime and Owen Guest, and Tom stepping in to play a great game at 10 albeit with limited ball.
Unfortunately our physical integrity did not match our defensive integrity and by half time we had lost Tubsy to a torn calf muscle, Andy Dewhurst to being knocked out – (who appears to be doing well since), Clarkey to a dead arm and embarrassingly someone else in the backs who I cannot remember. This left us with our subs used up by half time, and 14 men after about 45 minutes. The most dry moment of the game may have been Pete Richardson coming up to me very calmly saying, “I think I might have broken my finger, I’m pretty certain it’s not meant to look like this…”

Fortunately it appeared to be dislocated as after popping it back in he had no further problems with it (13 men would not have been fun).
At half time we were losing 10-7, and felt sure we could still win this game as we had barely had the ball, however with the man down, loss of key players and the resulting set piece dominance of their pack prevented this. The 7 points came out of the blue from Owen Guest stepping in to play at 9 as I had to cover flanker, and running the most mazy run seen in many a year.

They scored 2 tries late on, making the final score 27 – 7 although we came very close to scoring 2 more tries, both opportunistic attempts but not quite to be.

Whilst the score suggests a fair loss, this was a very very close and hard fought game, especially given the fact there were 6 players who played their first 1-2 games for us. If we play with this intensity week in and week out, there won’t be many teams that can live with us.

Next week, we welcome Watford 2’s to Stortford!

Chris