St Ives 34 Stamford 10
St Ives kicked off their 2007/2008 league season with a convincing victory over Stamford RFC.
St Ives hosted Stamford at home on a bright sunny afternoon. Stamford won the toss and elected to play downhill in the first half.
Playing downhill with the sun at their backs and gentle breeze behind them, Stamford were seemingly gifted possession. St Ives kicked off but the kick did not travel the required 10 metres, so Stamford opted for a scrum on half way. However, in what was to be the start of a bad day for the Stamford scrum, the ever strong St Ives scrum managed to disrupt Stamford. This was to set the pattern of play at the scrum, with St Ives dominating for the majority of the match, comfortably controlling their own ball and winning ball “against the head”.
However, despite this dominance at set piece play, it was St Ives who were to fall first. After some confusion in the St Ives defence, Stamford were able to use their downhill advantage and cross the St Ives line for a try. The conversion was unsuccessful. 5-0 to Stamford.
St Ives struck back almost immediately. After some strong forward dominance from St Ives in the ruck – a week point in their last game – fly half Jack Blackley spotted a hole in the Stamford defence and put an audacious chip over their line. It looked to have failed, but St Ives winger Marc Sands streaked up the pitch and collected a lucky bounce to fall over the Stamford line for the try. Blackley was unsuccessful with the conversion.
This was to be the start of a period of excellent play from St Ives. At the lineout, hooker James Yeomans was finding his jumpers Matt Ball and Andy Grieve regularly, and the St Ives scrum, led by the devastating front row of Pete Hammond, Yeomans and Jim Lewsham, was solid on its own ball and disruptive on Stamfords put in. This dominance in the forwards enabled the St Ives backs to open up and play an expansive brand of rugby. Blackley, on form for a game winning performance, bossed his back line and created gaps for the others to run through. St Ives backs James Cannon, David “Lamb Chop” Williams and Paul Ashbridge crossed the line once each to bring the half time score to 20 – 5 to St Ives. Unfortunately Blackley’s place kicking was not as good as his kicking from hand, and missed the conversions.
The second half saw St Ives start confidently, with a decent cushion of points. However, when mounting a defence on their own 22metre line, scrum half Dan Stewart accidentally “spear tackled” one of Stamford’s forwards and was sent of for dangerous play. St Ives were now down to 14 men for the remainder of the game, and had to bring on youngster Nick Borkett to fill the errant scrum half’s shoes.
With a one man advantage, St Ives expected Stamford to push their advantage, but for the most part they stood firm. However, after a series of errors by St Ives, Stamford managed to create an overlap and their winger went in under the posts. The conversion was unsuccessful. However, the St Ives forwards continued to battle hard in the set piece and in the loose and give Blackley time to orchestrate several attacks, two of which culminated in Blackley putting up cross field kicks for outside centre Paul Ashbridge to tag onto to complete his hat-trick. This time though, the conversions were successful, bringing the score line to 34-10 in St Ives favour.
Speaking after the game, St Ives captain Pete Hammond said “This is a dream start to our season. We managed to put the problems of our warm up fixtures to bed in emphatic fashion, rucking aggressively and sensibly, and mauling confidently and effectively with our scrum half(s!) controlling the forwards. This was a much improved performance. Our tackling could still do with some work, but on the whole I am very pleased with how we performed today. Our dominance in the forwards gave our backs the time to go through their moves, and this also ensured that Stamford’s backs were starved of possession. Hopefully we can take this standard into our next matches – a friendly against local rivals St Neots on September the 22nd and our next league game away to Deepings on September 29th.”