Cannock 32 - Harborne 3

Harborne will want to forget Sat 24th Nov 2012 as a day of disappointing rugby all round.

With a few last minute changes leading up to travelling to Cannock Harborne were relatively subdued, mainly in part to majority of team getting lost trying to find it (good luck future teams) and the weather looked delightful.
We finally all arrived and got out onto the pitch with 20mins of warm up – hard to warm up in the rain and mud but we tried.
With several unavailable players we had none other than Coach Gary Lambert gracing us with his presence on the bench, having put his boots on for the first time since his dislocated elbow the summer of 2011.

It was our kick to them at the start and Cannock made the initial error of knocking on from this. This then set the tone of a long day as they had one over on us in the scrum and this theme carried on during the rest of the 80mins.
With a scrum going backwards it was hard for Millsy at 8 and Hodgy at 9 to create clean ball for the backs but when we did the Cannock defence held true.
With the wind behind us and playing downhill we threw all we could muster at Cannock, with both teams side by side each other in the table we knew it was going to be tight game.
With some strong running from both Craige and Emir we couldn’t make any inroads and the first try came from Cannock. Their centre (?) breaking through and offloading to support who in turn offloaded again for the score, converted.

With a strong defence Harborne were unable to breach the Cannock line and the home side were doing well with an offloading game to keep Harborne on their toes.
Some penalty kicks from Cannock went awry but other than that not much happened. Whenever Harborne did make any ground, which was quite often, they were found guilty of over ambitious passes or offloading in the poor weather to generally stop the play (scrum) or give Cannock the ball.

At halftime it was 7-0 with all to play for.

Having now swapped ends, running up the hill with wind in our faces, a decision at half time to avoid kicking at all times was called for. This was mostly in part to Harborne feeling the only thing letting Cannock into the game was our own indiscretions and mistakes – in part true but to be fair Cannock’s defence and offloading in contact (when we did tackle) was working well.

There were then a couple of penalty shots from each side, and with a massive wind against us Mr Heaney managed to pull one through, but so did they – 10-3 Cannock.

The next try came from a serious of pick and go’s from Cannock, choosing to move up the pitch piece by piece rather than risk their backs versus ours.
Around this time Millsy went off with a sore back which completed all our substitutions, with Will gone off from 10 with hamstring and Rhys off from prop with a sore head.
This led to a re-shuffle across the park with some out of place players and our Coach Mr Lambert returning to the field after 15months.
This also meant that we lost our second jumper, with our first jumper competing for our own ball and theirs, this meant our line-out broke down – to follow suit of our scrummages.

Shortly after Gary’s return to action he was forced off, or at least down, with a (if you take his screaming into account) a painful knee injury.
This was quite horrific and what ensued was 10 minutes of players trying to keep warm, our 9 sandwiched between two props, as we waited for an ambulance.
During this time the game next door finished and with both sides searching for the bonus point we transferred pitches.

Unfortunately Harborne never left the first pitch and what ensued over the next ten minutes was one of the most woeful displays of rugby from Harborne, 1-15, that I have seen.
With Harborne switching off, and being down to 14 men, Cannock ran in three tries in the last ten minutes.
The first was a series of mis-tackles, the second was a mistake from Harborne which was hacked through and the last was a fine (to be fair) individual try from their winger who caught the ball from the re-start and ran in an arc through everyone to score.

The final score was 32-3 to Cannock.

Harborne, heads down, congratulated Cannock and worked their way to the changing room. Knock it on the head lads, take what you feel today to fuel the fire for the next game was called.

My last words are that you would have thought this was bad enough but having played in the coldest and muddiest game thus far of the season we found the showers didn’t work, then with 17 players now trying to get re-dressed to go back to their own club to shower the lights went out, completely. Imagine a pitch black changing room with 17 naked rugby players, no heating, no showers and in a space no bigger than 3m x 4myou couldn’t help but laugh.
To the majority not a nice experience (to some maybe?).
When we finally left the Ambulance had just about finished picking up Gary after getting lost for 25mins. FYI – Gary is fine, he won’t be playing rugby for awhile, but he is fine.

Anyway, that leaves Harborne sitting in fourth in the table with two games now that they will be kicking themselves over. Change the result on the return fixture lads.