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Vets Frantic Farnham Finale

Vets Frantic Farnham Finale

Myles Woodley5 Apr 2017 - 21:38
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Last league game match report Farnham 7 Quins 0

Quins Vets were up against Farnham Rugby Club away for the last game of the season, which is a pretty tough outing and midway through the week with only seven players, looked an impossible ask. This became even tricker when Karl failed to recover from a rousing massage from Karensa and Brando declared himself available in a photographic capacity only.

However, our scouting policy rivals the best clubs in the land and we managed to recruit a youngish looking vet from Peterborough on friday night, named Adam, which gave us a full compliment and who also turned out to be comfortably man of the match.

With only 15 players to begin with, Si Morgan not fancying the first 20 minutes, Quins selection was straightforward albeit with PA now guaranteed a starting place, he was agitating for the fly half position, which we had to stamp on quickly. This was unlike Farnham on the other hand who appeared to have enough players to field several teams and went through a vigorous warm up. Our forwards warm up looked good, our backs warm up verged on the pointless, with long discussions of complicated backs moves descending into increasing levels of fantasy given the appalling conditions.

A brief summary of the first half, an optimistic report would say we spent most of the time camped in our own half, but in reality we were defending our try line as wave after wave of Farnham units 'came round the corner'. Si Rowland secured some awesome steals of the ball in the first half to relieve our pressure and Mawson and Luke led the backs in chopping down Lieutenant Hightower who was playing for the opposition at inside centre. Bang on cue, Luke suffered a recurrence of his back injury after 20 minutes, to be replaced by Si Morgan who had fortunately just arrived and almost scored a superb breakaway try in the first half. Farnham kept coming and only some excellent defensive work by James Welsh, Big Jim and JD kept them out. Our scrum was also under real pressure, but Adam and Hugh combined excellently throughout the first half to get the ball out quickly at the set piece and 'boot the ball' downfield. Somehow the first half ended nil - nil, frankly no one including the ref could believe it and needless to say the backs had not executed any moves.

With half the team gasping for air, we regrouped, said some rousing words, kicked off the second half, and as luck would have it immediately conceded the only try of the game to make it 7 - 0, which ended up being the final score. A few points from the second half however, - firstly our forwards, led by Brian, Nogs and Matt Ferraby got on top of Farnham in the scrum, winning a couple against the head, which was great to see. Secondly, we almost scored, when Adam broke through, passed to Aidy Mawson who unfortunately declined to pass to your match-day reporter and finally, whilst we were unable to break the deadlock, we ended the stronger team, with Farnham tiring and Quins almost scoring a couple more times through some great runs by Gus, PA and Dave. Our tackling throughout the game was first class and Farnham knew they had been in a tight game - if not one for the purists!

A very big thanks to Nogs & Adam who travelled so far to get to the game and a great end (if not a winning score) to the season

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