Bishop's Stortford 1st XV 30 Darlington Mowden Park 31

To be fair, DMP fully deserved today's win, but the 18 point start pretty much gifted to them made their job much easier. The first 23 minutes were redolent of the poor performance in the previous home game against Cambridge, with no aggression in defence and little imagination on the rare occasions that possession was secured - particularly disappointing after the positive and confident approach to last week's game at Moseley.

Darlington, looking confident in possession, took full advantage of Stortford's lacklustre start and ran in 3 tries within 23 minutes, taking full advantage of some poor home handling - albeit under pressure from aggressive DMP defence - and compounded these errors with some uncharacteristically weak tackling. The visitors' flyhalf, Warren Seals had his kicking radar tuned in and converted all of them despite the tricky crosswind. All that Stortford could offer in return was a penalty from fullback, Tom Walker after 9 minutes. Having made a couple of tactical personnel changes, Stortford did eventually find a bit of cohesion and a half break by Sam Winter led to a try by Seb Brownhil,, after the prop slipped the first-up tackle and galloped over under the posts from 20 metres out after 38 minutes. Walker's conversion produced a halftime score of 10-21, which barely reflected the balance of play.

The home side, however, started the second period much more positively and were rewarded with an early penalty under DMP's posts, allowing Walker to narrow the deficit further. With Stortford's scrum now totally dominant, they were able, courtesy of a number of penalties to apply territorial pressure and Charlie Kingham at No 8 took full advantage with tries after 51 and 57 minutes to take his side into a 2 point lead. Walker's conversion attempts both failed, though he was very unlucky with the second, directly into the wind from the touchline, which bounced out off the post. Unfortunately, Stortford were unable to exit successfully from the restart and the visitors soon won a penalty, converted, almost inevitably by Seals to regain the lead. Pretty much directly from the restart, though, the visitors produced by far the best passage of play in the game, with offload after offload to excellent support runners, allowing them to sweep 80 metres upfield and score a tremendous try finished off by Seals, who added the easy conversion. Stortford might well have folded at this stage, but instead showed tremendous character to fly back onto the attack, with the set scrum, once again proving to be a great strength, with Dec Caulfield and JP Nel now on as replacements. Kingham had a third try disallowed for a knock-on, as he ambitiously tried to reach over a ruck for the touchdown, but pressure on Darlington was maintained. After the visitors' No 6 was yellow carded for upending a Stortford player at a ruck, the bonus point try was scored by Luis Ball from a driving maul and Walker's conversion narrowed the deficit to a single point. The home side naturally hurled themselves into the search for the crucial further score, but unfortunately lacked the guile to break down Darlington's determined defence.

The Westbury Garden Rooms' man of the match award went to Tom Walker, who put in an outstanding performance, after being moved up from fullback to scrumhalf after the first half tactical reshuffle by Stortford, though Seb Brownhill's 80 minutes at prop must have pushed him very close.