Its easy to go into far too much depth when trying to analyse a defeat - the weather, the hill, the ref a butterfly flapping its wings in the Pacific... So I have decided to just stick with just one tried and trusted cliché. It was very much a game of two halves.
The early exchanges fell firmly in our favour - our lineout functioning well, our scrum just abut holding its own and Rollings' boot giving us plenty of field position courtesy of a string of penalties awarded against Lincoln at the breakdown. Lincoln held firm though and restricted us to 2 penalties, whilst they managed to snatch a try from poor marking during a rare excursion into our 22. 25 minutes gone and 6-7 reflected the fact that the Lincoln back line was just about managing to hold its own against ours, mainly because there was not enough clean service. But once this was addressed, Ben Radford soon opened our account after picking an excellent line through the Lincoln defence off a simple scissors move. Not to be outdone by his centre partner, George Alcock quickly followed up with a score for himself after a good offensive lineout allowed the backs to do one of those fancy move thingies. Half time: 18-7.
The team talk at half time wrote itself: 'we've got this, just keep doing much the same thing'.
The team talk and the match however very quickly went out of the window. Lincoln cleverly switched their elusive 13 to 10, who was able to repeatedly take advantage of some disorganised defensive alignments to drive Lincoln up the pitch, and the more we tried to chase the game the more we tired, and this viscous cycle meant that the second half scoreline read a staggering, and a little flattering 29-0. Full time, 18-36, and Lincoln demonstrated why they won the Pennant group last year.
I almost forgot to talk about the massive massive hit that James Bloor put in - it was sickening. The man that he hit needed two ambulances and even two police officers to attend....
Man the match was Andy Rollings - excellent counter attacking from fullback all day, and even in the face of a big loss, the referee was of the opinion that he was overall man of the match, and that he could have won it for us if the had been better support for his running.
Dick of the day - the panel met and decided that James Armstrong-Holmes just shaded by breaking well from the base of the scrum, but then spoiling it by momentarily thinking he was Imanol Harinordoquy and throwing an outrageous flick out the back of his hand... to the opposition winger, who duly strolled under the posts!
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