Stew Mel vs Kirkcaldy, 18/10/03

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Squad

The Stewart's Melville FP RFC team to play Kirkcaldy RFC at Inverleith on Saturday, kick off 3 pm, is:

The team shows three changes from last week, with Nick Wood returning from injury at Stand Off. The resulting backline reshuffle means that Richard Borthwick drops out this week.

Up front, Peter McLean gets his first start at hooker after impressing from off the bench in the last couple of weeks, Alex Edmonstone switching places on the bench with him. Simon Capaldi is preferred as the second row option this week to Derek Freemantle, who drops to the bench.

With Kirkcaldy only below us in the league on points difference, this is a key fixture for Stew Mel, and your support would be most welcome.

Riggers' Review

We have to be happy with our 64-3 win over Kirkcaldy at the weekend. We played some good stuff and scored some really good tries. At the end of the game, Benzo challenged the team to find consistency. Consistency in performance, consistency in results. Only then will we have arrived as a team in Premier 2. At this moment in time we are all wondering what team will turn up next Saturday at Netherdale. Will it be the team who, on Saturday, were committed in defence, turning over ball, moving the ball to men in space and generally running Kirkcaldy off the park, or will it be the team who have turned up on too many other occasions so far this season.

To have achieved the win playing with fourteen men for 30 minutes of the game was a bit of an achievement, too. To have three players sin-binned should give cause for concern regarding our discipline. I don't think we would have got away with the situation against any other teams in the league, and were fortunate to have got away with it on Saturday. We did, however, and it's not something worth concerning ourselves over. The person most upset at the situation was Stuart Clark, who ended up in the Second Row for 30 minutes!

We scored ten tries on Saturday, and I suppose pride of place among the scorers has to go to Chris Bissett, who finally crossed the line to record his first try in four and a half years. It might not have been the most spectacular of tries, but I doubt any of the other nine scored will mean as much to the scorer as that did to Chris. It will, hopefully, be the start of a prolific run in the team. Sam also took his points tally to 79 for the season with seven conversions, and he is averaging over thirteen points a game for us.

More important for me, though, was the fact that we finally managed to hold a team out and not concede any tries. Defence has been a major part of the work we have been doing in training and, until Saturday, that may not have looked like the case. The team defended well as a unit and Saturday was a good day to get the 'go forward in defence' attitude right. We will need that on Saturday down in Gala. This has been the major Jekyll and Hyde part of our game. When we defend well, we play well. The boys need to get the attitude right from the start.

Riggers

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