Ross High vs Stew Mel, 7/9/02

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Squad

The Stewart's Melville FPRFC team to play Ross High at Tranent on Saturday, 3 pm kick off, is:

The team shows several changes from the one which eventually took the field and defeated East Kilbride last Saturday. Michael Elliott returns from injury, Kenny Milligan is available after attending a wedding last Saturday and Fraser Pollock returns to the fray after the birth of his daughter, Amy.

Up front Koli Latailakepa comes in for the unavailable Steve Cully and Ally Maclay is preferred in the back row to Dougie Rycroft. Daniel Smit is still not cleared, with the hold up being at the South African end. It is hoped that he should now be available for the Musselburgh game. Stewart Bennet returns to training this weekend and, hopefully, should get an outing next weekend, also.

Steven Reed is still suffering from his hamstring strain suffered in the game with Heriot's, but is not far away from being available again.

Riggers' Review

The silence that greeted the final whistle at Tranent on Saturday perhaps best sums up the feelings that the Stew/Mel faithful were going through. For the first time in a long while, our travelling support was considerable, and, whilst the result was what they all wanted, the performance was below par against a stuffy Ross High side who fought all the way to the final whistle.

Another late change in the starting line up saw Euan Clark replace Stuart Thom at scrum half, making it 10 changes from the team that started against East Kilbride. A grand total of 25 players have already been used in the two league games and this perhaps goes partly to explain the lack of cohesion in our play. Euan, at 18 years old in his first league game, did extremely well despite the best efforts of his forwards in trying to get him maimed by some of the ball they were throwing back to him, but he battled on gamely and showed that he is going to follow in the footsteps of Julian Scott and Graeme Burns and become a great scrum-half for the club.

The game started with Ross High kicking off to us, with Stew/Mel having the wind advantage. In a scrappy opening quarter, we failed to establish any real authority in the game, mainly due to the number of penalties that were being given away. Very few of these penalties were in doubt, the forwards just not reacting to the instructions of the referee. With the defence being so good round the fringes, it was very frustrating to watch us give away penalty after penalty. It's a self discipline thing, and the forwards should all be disappointed with their efforts. As Coach Christie could be heard shouting, 'It's not acceptable'. A half yard step backwards would have rectified the problem, but this was not done. This will definitely be worked on this week in training.

To give an example of how good our defence was, Ross High took a quick penalty about 5 metres from our line, and, after possibly 8 tackles by the Stew/Mel defence, we were eventually awarded a scrummage on the Ross High 10 metre line after they knocked on. Why we couldn't just take the half step back with the defence being like that is a mystery. As the referee said afterwards, the key to winning the game was in our defence, but, with our discipline being so poor, we were going to struggle to get a foothold on the game.

Thankfully we managed a couple of tries to build a 14-0 lead. Mike Elliott showed how dangerous he is from full back and scored to the left of the posts after the team realised that, by moving the ball a couple of passes from the breakdown, we would have the pace to cause trouble to the Ross High defence. The second try came from a lineout 5 metres from the Ross High line where we caught and drove before Koli Latailakepa broke unopposed up the blind side to score in the corner. Both tries were converted.

A half-time chat led to the forwards resolving to improve their performance, but they never quite shook themselves out of their slumbers. For some reason there was an unwillingness to commit numbers to the breakdown unless absolutely necessary and this led to Ross High forcing their way back into the game, firstly through a penalty and then a converted try which occurred due to a missed tackle. At 14-10, and with Ross High in the ascendancy, we found ourselves under the cosh with a 5 yard scrum to defend. Thankfully, Malky MacColl managed to produce a strike against the head and the danger was cleared. Fraser Pollock then kicked the first of his penalties to stretch our lead, before another 5 metre lineout led to Koli getting a double on his debut. Fraser kicked a final penalty and a break out by Sky Laurie nearly earned us a bonus point that our play barely deserved.

Then came the silence.

Afterwards, the boys were happy to have won, but not in the manner it was achieved. This is hopefully a good sign. The big disappointment for me was in the manner of the performance. Maybe we expect too much, but, when you look through the players we had on the pitch, I think we are entitled to think that a decent performance should be the norm. The team are certainly fitter than before, they have all the skills, but do they have the desire to succeed? Only the team can answer that question and they can start by doing so at Musselburgh next week.

Riggers

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