Opening Loss For Seconds

Saturday 13th saw Harlequin Amateurs second XV take to the field for the first time in the ‘18/19 season with a match against Old Emanuel 3s at Broom Road.

With both the 1s and 2s set to be in action, it was a credit to everyone at the club that the coaches were able to put two full squads together. Alas, Ickenham were unable to field a side and the 1s game was called off. This did, however, allow for a large contingent of first team players cheering on their mates in the 2s fixture.

The game kicked off and it wasn’t too long before the crowd were treated to some attractive running rugby. On four minutes, the ball was spun out to Kay Frazer, who turned on the gas to sprint past three would-be tacklers and score his first try for the club. A beauty it was too! Mike Graham successfully slotted the touchline conversion. A 7-0 lead after only five minutes looked optimistic for Quins.

OE responded almost immediately though and their speedy winger ran in for their opening try. The conversion made, and the scores were level again after seven minutes. The following ten minutes were dominated by OE who used their big runners to punch holes in the Quins defence and a well worked driving maul in the Quins “22” saw the OE blinside flanker make a break for the line before offloading well to the scrum half to run in for their second score on 13 minutes. And after the ball was held up over the try line, OE were awarded a scrum on 18 minutes. The ball made it as far as the fly half, who barrelled over under the posts for OE’s third try. Suddenly, at 19-7 after barely 20 minutes, the game looked to be getting away from Quins.

Joe Watkins and Aaron Addis seemed to have other ideas than to let the game get away though. From the restart, Joe showed great skill to chase the kick, gather the ball and offload to Aaron who ran in to score his first of the afternoon. The kick was just wide. Aaron’s second came just before half time after Joe Watkins again made a nuisance of himself, this time stealing a lineout and again releasing Aaron to dive over to the right hand side of the sticks. Mike’s conversion brought the half time score to 17-19.

The second half started brightly for Quins, in particular a great run up the left hand touch line by Jimmy Lynch that saw him brought down just short of the line. Unfortunately, the organisation that comes with playing together week in, week out began to show for OE and they were able to step up through the gears. On 56’ their scrum half was able to grab his second as he peeled from the back of an uncontested scrum to score (Unfortunately for us Gavin Miller was too effective off the bench and routinely broke whoever was put in front of him!). Simon Morgan then found himself in the wrong colour jersey and scored a great individual try against his own club. One further OE try brought the final score to 17-40. A well deserved win for a team we look forward to playing again later in the season.

Overall, a very promising performance for the boys and it was great to see everyone getting the game time they deserve after so much hard work has been put in on the training field. With a few more games and a bit more “gelling”, hopefully we can reverse the result at OE in February. Followed by a club karaoke night at the local Korean restaurant/karaoke bar!