St Ives 26 Kempston 36
St Ives continued their 2007/2008 season with their first home fixture against Kempston RFC.
The match itself was again 4 20 minute quarters, a format usually employed to enable sides to swap in and out players to try different players out and to assess their abilities. After last weeks depleted side, St Ives enjoyed the relative luxury of being able to field almost 30 players.
St Ives started brightly, with some excellent play in both set pieces and open play. Some intelligent play from Paul Ashbridge at outside half opened up the Kempston defence and allowed St Ives some storming runs down field and a brace of early tries. The St Ives scrum, always a strong point, held firm as always and allowed some stability from which to launch some solid assaults on the Kempston try line.
However, after this excellent start, some cracks started to appear in the St Ives side. Some sloppy fringe defence around a ruck gifted Kempston a soft try, and Kempston also began to evade the St Ives tacklers, at one point running seemingly through the entire St Ives side untouched. Buoyed by these successes, Kempston lifted their game and came back strongly, beating St Ives at rucks and turning over possession in the tackle area. This was to be the tone for the rest of the game, and finally Kempston won through to win 36-26.
Speaking after the match, St Ives captain Pete Hammond said “I am both pleased and disheartened by today’s performance. At times we looked confident and comfortable in possession of the ball, and were able to use it well. But at other times we seemed to simply go to sleep, losing the ball when tackled and almost forgetting how to ruck. Times when we should have been guaranteed possession we came up empty handed, and our defence was missing in some instances – they brought some big lads on and we seemed scared to bring them down. On the plus side though, we know what to work on in training and can take heart from our performance in the first half. We also may have found some new talent in the form of some of our younger players who stepped up today and performed admirably. Hopefully we can iron out our problems before our first league fixture against Stamford on the 15th of September.”
St Ives try scorers were Steve Burke, Paul Ashbridge and Ollie Scott.