West of Scotland vs Stew Mel, 30/11/02

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Squad

The Stewart's Melville team for Saturday's game with West of Scotland, 2 pm kick off at Burnbrae, is:

The team shows two changes from the one that beat Musselburgh last week, with the absence of the unavailable John Healy being forced upon us. Stuart Clark returns after illness prevented him playing last weekend, and he is a straight swap in the second row for John. Ally Maclay has come into the back row instead of Richard Simms, who is on the bench and will definitely be utilised during the game.

A good session was had on Tuesday evening, with input from Graeme Burns regarding ball protection and presentation in the tackle and contact situations. Burnsy had been down to watch the game last weekend, and his observations are always welcome.

This is the start of an important run of games for us, especially if we are to close the gap on the leaders. West are going well and we know from the tough first encounter at Inverleith that it will be a physical match. The team are in buoyant mood after last Saturday's win over Musselburgh, though, and can't wait for kick off.

Any supporters wishing to travel on the team bus to Burnbrae should be at Inverleith for departure at 11 am sharp.

Riggers' Review

Well, the 30 game record of taking at least a point in each game came to a spectacular end on Saturday afternoon at Burnbrae. West ran out deserved winners by 38-10, which asks many questions of our squad for the remaining 5 league games of the season.

For those who had seen the first game of the season between the two teams at Inverleith, they could have been forgiven for thinking at half-time that a carbon copy was on display. West started the game hammering at our line and deservedly took the lead through a lineout drive. At this stage, we were making it easy for West by making many mistakes and giving away penalties. We were fortunate not to go further behind, but West missed a couple of penalties and, after this let off, we seemed to wake out of our slumbers. Having been on the back foot, we started to take the game to West, and scored an excellent try through Stuart Bartwicki. It was something we'd been working on at training, so it was pretty pleasing to score from it. We had chances to stretch the lead through a couple of difficult penalties, but it was not to be.

We arrived, then at, half-time, very much in the game and probably the more confident of the two sides. We talked about increasing the pace of the game and trying to move the bigger West pack around a bit. When the opportunity was on, we were going to have a real go out wide and stretch them as much as we could. Then, unfortunately for us, the whistle went to restart the game ...!

We are now 48 hours from the final whistle and I am still struggling to find out what went wrong in the second half. In fact, to be honest, we are talking about a 20 minute period where West sniffed the chance to put us away, and did it in style. The first 10 minutes or so was pretty even, then we gave away a penalty under the posts. We then started to get turned over in contact situations, which we've been pretty good at recently (Burnsy's training session obviously worked a treat!), the defence, which has been outstanding all season, stopped functioning, and it looked like the heart and soul had been ripped out the team as we could do nothing to stop a rampant West team who scored five tries in a short period of time. The West back row forward Mark Pope was rampaging through our first line of defence, and, by the time he'd finished, we were 38-5 down.

We did manage to come back and score another good try, this time through Steve Cully's first for the club, but, at this stage, it was a case of far too little, far too late.

So we move onto next week. There is no point dwelling on last Saturday. The next big hurdle will be on us before we know it. Dundee arrive at Inverleith on Saturday for a game that takes on even more significance now that Edinburgh Accies are putting a fine run of results together. Training will be tough this week. The boys are down. The best way to get back up is to perform on Saturday. A bad 20 minutes does not turn us into a bad team. We still have quality throughout the squad. We need to bring it to the surface on Saturday, and, if we can take anything away from the West game, it is the way they got their tails up and kept coming back for more. A real ruthless attitude. It is something we are going to require in our final five league games.

Riggers

Stew Mel Stats

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