Stew Mel vs West of Scotland, 21/9/02

• Click here to jump to Riggers' Review
• Click here to jump to Stew Mel Stats

Squad

The Stewart's Melville Team for Saturday's game with West of Scotland, 3 pm kick off at Inverleith, is:

The side shows three changes from the one that took the field last Saturday at Musselburgh. Fraser Deeming is out injured with both knee and shoulder injuries picked up in that match. It looks like Fraser may be out for up to 4 weeks. Fraser's misfortune allows Richard Borthwick to come into the back line for his first league start. Richard has come off the bench the last two Saturdays and looked very impressive, so we have no worries regarding the job he will be able to do for us.

There are two changes up front, with Steve Cully starting instead of Mike Harper, who will be utilised as an impact player early in the 2nd half. Daniel Smit's clearance is through, and he will partner Paul Keith in the second row, allowing Stuart Clark to join a back row reshuffled due to John Healy being unavailable.

On the injury front, other than Fraser Deeming's injury, Simon Attridge is still struggling to shake off the dead leg picked up against East Kilbride. The physios reckon he might still be a couple of weeks away from returning to action. Euan Graham has been out with a sprung rib cartilage, and, again, is a couple of weeks away from recovery as well. Ally Maclay is resting up to try and cure his shin splints. Scott Bowman broke a toe in two places last Saturday and will be out for 4-6 weeks. Chris Bissett is also struggling with a dead leg, but may come into contention for the 2nd XV if he passes a fitness test. Steven Reed is seeing the knee specialist this week, so we will hopefully have an answer to the problem by the weekend.

Riggers' Review

For some reason, I couldn't help but whistle the theme from 'The Great Escape' after Saturday's game. It's weird writing this review, because, in reality we should have been so far behind at half-time that it would be difficult to be upbeat. However, thanks to Kenny Milligan's quick thinking on the stroke of half-time for Mike Elliott's try, we went in 15-13 down instead of 15-6, and very much in the game. Then, in the second half, the Stew/Mel that we know exists came to the fore and we won the game going away from West and really should have won by more.

For some reason, the defence, which had been so impressive in previous weeks, was poor. Instead of being offensive and putting in big hits, the team were missing first up tackles and were content to try and scrag the West team to the ground through a mixture of arm grabbing or jersey pulling. With a team as physical as West, this wasn't going to be good enough, and their three first half tries were testimony to that. It was frustrating, from the sidelines, to watch the West stand off and outside centre turn their backs and have runners run off them without anyone from the Stew/Mel side putting in a hit that would have made them think twice about turning their backs in the first place..

The first half was also not helped by losing three of the side with injuries, Benzo, Struan and Paul all taking knocks that stopped them taking any further part in the game. For your information, they also probably happen to be the three worst people to be stuck in a technical area with! The loss of these three meant a certain amount of reshuffling had to be done, most noticeably behind the scrum. To accommodate Struan's loss, Mike moved from 15 to stand off, Fraser moved to inside centre and Borth to full back, with Gav coming onto the wing. However, we never really noticed the changes, which goes to show that we've got some versatile players.

The second half was so much better, it was quite frightening. It seemed that there was a realisation that, if we moved the ball into space, then we could stretch the West defence and cause problems out wide. This was certainly better to watch than the sight out of our backs being smashed by the big West backs. We were fortunate that the West full back was sin-binned, but it was pleasing that we could see how to exploit it. Both Gav and Welchy's tries were executed brilliantly, with the space caused by the full back's absence being exploited fully.

So another win. Four from four. This is a very testing part of the season, with a visit to high flying Dundee next week then unbeaten Haddington at home the week after. The team are improving slowly week by week, but a massive challenge awaits us next week. We must perform for 80 minutes on Saturday and get our defence back to being offensive. If we do that, then we'll have a chance of leaving Mayfield with the points.

Riggers

Stew Mel Stats

Return to 1st XV Fixtures page