Bromyard 14 - 8 Harborne

Harborne travelled away to Bromyard, one of the many re-arranged fixtures we have to fulfil following the recent weather.

With the recent loss to Fiji...I mean Market Drayton....the side was much changed with only two enforced positional changes causing concern (this was later to be proved unfounded).

With the weather the night before being somewhat wet so was the pitch. This therefore created perfect conditions for the forwards, helped alot by the backs knocking on the wet ball.

Harborne started well, pressurizing the home team but a spate of penalties at scrum time and at the ruck area allowed Bromyard to make their way up the field. Luckily the Bromyard lineout was not firing on all cylinders and after a time the home side stopped kicking to touch and played a tap and go game.

The home side had the first points courtesy of a penalty, 3-0 to Bromyard. This spurred Harborne into action and a series of drives from Millsy, Willow, Liam and Gibbo a rare penalty out way saw a quick thinking quick penalty and Roberto was under the posts. Mr Heaney, having a good game around the park, missed the conversion. 3-5 to the visitors.

I don't know what happened and how it came about, I do think it was down to a stupid amount of penalties and bunching at the ruck in D, Bromyard went over for a try. Unconverted, 8-5 to the home side.

Shortly after this Willow was sin binned after numerous offences, to be fair it was going to be him or Roger the way they were going, but during this time Harborne managed to level it off with a penalty kick of their own. There was also a unnatural ten minutes of no scrums until Willow came back on.

We went into half time all level at 8-8.

After some words from the captain of the day Jamie Mills, a few changes on the pitch saw Lamb, Aiden and Josh enter the fray.

Harborne adopted a forwards orientated game and found themselves several times marching their way up the pitch, only to be undone by a knock on or turnover with players being isolated.

Shortly into the 2nd half Freddy, after an inspirational run from deep, took a knock to the face and retired. This brought Tom on and quite a few positional changes. The biggest being Emir going from his unusual position of scrum half to his unusual position of full back and flanker Josh going to no. 9.

This brought about a rugged game to start for Harborne as players settled and a penalty for something or other (can you tell it was me) allowed Bromyard to take the lead at 11-8.

This was very much so against the run of play with Harborne having been in control got a large number of the second half, with Dawsy and Heaney making hard lines followed swiftly by a good running game from the forwards.

However, again our penalty count let us down and Bromyard were able to steal another kick to end the game at 14-8, despite the best intentions of Harborne in the final 8 minutes where they worked so hard to get so close.

MOM - was Emir for his great game at 9
DOD no. 1 - Heaney for ending the game whilst attacking and preventing us from scoring the elusive try
DOD no. 2 - Willow for his repeated infringements and sin bin.
DOD no. 3 - Lamb (forever more known as Skippy) for his audacious step/skip that shows why forwards always take route 1 as they cannot step

If anyone wants to add or dispute the above then feel free to volunteer to write next weeks ;-)