S1 vs West of Scotland Match Report

We never played West of Scotland much in the Mini era as often the fixtures fell victim to the weather so there was a bit of a trip into the unknown aura surrounding our away match on Sunday.

The boys all turned up in plenty of time allowing a good warm-up session to take place. This showed from the kick-off as we didn’t do our usual half-asleep routine but instead started brightly (apart from knocking-on the kick-off because nobody called for it !). Though the first 10 minutes were scoreless we enjoyed the majority of the possession and territory largely bossing the scrums and rucks.

The breakthrough came when Calum at outside centre out-ran the covering defence to score in the corner. Within a coupe of minute we repeated the trick with David going over in the other corner and Calum slotted one of the longest kicks this season. 0-7 to Marr.

We then switched off and from the re-start West fed their biggest forward who brushed off attempted tackles that were too high before offloading to West’s tall centre who went through some more weak tackles to score. 3 passes and 2 players had covered 55 metres and we were now only 4-7 up.

However the first period of 15 minutes had shown the boys they could win this game and their belief meant they dominated the next 15 minutes scoring 3 tries (David again, Scott Rodger and Logan) and 2 conversions (Scott Grassom and Scott Toner) to no reply from West. David’s try was the pick of the day with the forwards winning the ball about 30 metres out before it passed through all the hands for David to finish, spectacularly, in the corner; a great team effort. End of 2nd period 4-18 to Marr.

We lost Calum during and Thomas at the end of the 2nd period but the squad and team performance was strong enough to tie the 3rd period 4-4 with our score coming from Scott Rodger bursting through the defence and running 40 metres straight down the middle of the pitch (in years to come he will learn that any try run-in by a prop counts as being at least 200 metres!). The try was converted by Andrew. The West centre scored his second right at the death (tackles !!) but it couldn’t take the gloss of a fine all-round performance. Final score West 8 – Marr 22.

Specially mention to the pack; a great performance where we always looked capable of winning any scrum, ruck or line-out even when it wasn’t our ball.

On top of the school win the day before it was a good weekend and hopefully sets us up for the matches between now and Christmas (weather permitting).