With the home pack looking only to disrupt the flow of the game, one direct outcome was a nightmare of set and reset scrums, which the officials were unable to put a stop to and a resultant minimum of creative rugby. To be fair, the home side were also very aggressive in their defence, on the few occasions that the ball actually escaped the scrummaging black hole and made it difficult for Stortford's backs to establish any kind of pattern of play. The first breakthrough came after 7 minutes, though, when a quickly taken penalty caught the home side off balance and Tom Banks' dart and pass gave winger, Nick Hankin enough room to be able to dance his way past the remaining defenders and touch down under the posts to give George Cullen an easy conversion. As the chilly and windy weather deteriorated briefly into a hailstorm, the quality of rugby slid again and it was only in the 32nd minute that the second score came, when Dave Aldam touched down from a driving maul after two penalties in quick succession at driving mauls gave field position. A number of further penalties saw the referee finally lose his patience after 38 minutes, to yellow card Southend's No 6, Todd Bailey. So successful, though were the home team's disruptive tactics at the scrum that, even one man short, they managed to exhaust the opposing pack with several reset scrums on their own 5 metre line and, eventually forced a turnover to end the half.

It was hard to imagine, but the second half managed to fall even below the standards of the first in terms of rugby played and it was only after the Southend 9 was yellow-carded after 22 minutes for some off the ball obstruction that another score came. Joe Clarke stepped inside from the left wing and ran diagonally into space from around halfway and the hitherto smothering home defence was caught completely on the wrong foot, as prop, Tom McCrone ran at right angles to his winger to take a well-timed pass and run in unopposed from some 20 metres out. Cullen struck another good conversion and then 8 minutes later rounded off the scoring with a clinical finish, after quick hands inside him took full advantage of a 50 metre dash by Hankin, after the winger had gathered a lucky bounce from a poor defensive Stortford kick but had been hauled down close to the opposition 22. The centre's 4th conversion out of 4 took the score to 0-28 and, with Stortford's bonus point win mission accomplished the game proceeded to peter out with little further incident beyond another yellow card for a Southend player - apparently for a headbutt.

Congratulations to the 4th team on their convincing Cup win today and let's hope this augurs well for our full array of Youth teams competing in the County Finals at OAs tomorrow!