pilkington Recs u9's 2 - 7 Ashton Bears

Hopes were high today following a great performance last week and what we found was a reminder that progress at this age is going to be mixed and if last week was 2 steps forward then this was just 1 step back.
In an almost mirror of the match at Ashton last season we went into the half time break trailing by 5 tries following a typically slow start from the young recs. We failed to do the simple things of moving up in a line in defence and struggled with remembering run numbers in attack and this resulted in a frustrating first half of the game.
The great thing with this team is they just always keep going and keep trying to improve and the second half showed again that when we play to our standard we are a match for any side in this grouping. The second half saw a much better defencive effort across the pitch with outstanding efforts on the right from Jack McIntyre and Nathan Flynn and Rhys Edwards keeping us safe on the left and then we had Ryan Halsall and Sam Nevit looking after the middle of the park and all getting into high numbers in the tackle count and this meant we held Ashton to just 2 tries in the second half.
We mixed up the attack more in the second half with some really nice set plays in with some quick play the balls and hard drives up the middle. The two tries came from very different attacks too, one a hard drive going through a gap after some good set up plays and the second came on the back of some free offloading on the last tackle where the boys made no fewer than 4 passes before Jack Mc ended with the ball and some space to run into to finish his second try of the game.

Overall, very much a game of two halves today and in amongst this there were some stand out performances, already mentioned Jack Mc was our parents choice and Sam Nevit secured the player of the match following what I think is his strongest all around game. The tackler of the match went to Carl Grimely, who whilst not making the most tackles of the game increased his overall number of tackles 3 fold and he was much more confident showing some of the potential we saw in his early training sessions.

The rest of the boys played hard in spells and ran well with the ball and we now just need to focus on gaining some consistency and the more training sessions we can get all the lads there for will be a huge help.