Harlow vs Welwyn Players Match Report

Harlow 21 - Welwyn 17.

The start of the day with an 1130 meet, with most of the team managing to make the meet on time, the only worry was whether Garthy had succeeded in booking a coach to take us to Harlow. It seemed touch and go for a while, but eventually, to Garthy’s evident delight the coach turned up and we were on our way.

The coach journey passed reasonably uneventfully, somehow not getting lost and arriving in good time. The warm up started a bit flat but built in intensity and we were in good shape by kick off. The match started off with Welwyn receiving the kick, the early exchanges were quite even until Harlow got on top with the advantage of the slope, earning a line out from which they managed to create a maul and their forwards ploughed over for an unconverted try. They followed this up with a period of sustained pressure, Welwyn defending strongly but eventually conceding under the posts which they duly converted, putting Harlow 12 - 0 up.

It was at this point Welwyn managed to start playing some of their own rugby putting the Harlow team under a lot of pressure, earning a penalty, which Dave Orton elected to kick for the corner. The subsequent line-out worked well and Muggy drove over for a try in the corner, which was unconverted. In this period of the match James Coughlin also thought he’d scored in the corner only to be called back for an earlier knock on and we missed a penalty attempt at goal. So going into half-time we were 12 - 5 down, however we’d ended the half strongly and we’re hoping for good things with the slope going with us in the second half.

At halftime Rob James came on for Owen Hopley and Jules for Muggy. We put them under early pressure when they knocked off from the kick off, but they managed to clear the lines with a 22 drop out and a few errors later we found ourselves conceding a penalty under the posts. They duly slotted this over and took a 15 - 5 lead. We responded well to this and had a series of attacks which led to man of the match James Turnball’s opening try near the posts, Gareth Hughes got the conversion to bring it back to 15 - 12.

Shortly following this James Coughlin was substituted for PJ and Beardy replaced by Hawkeye. I missed the next few minutes of play as I tried to get into one of the sub-suits. After a number of minutes I eventually negotiated this problem and returned attention to the game just in time to see Harlow kick another penalty and go 18 - 12 up. Welwyn attacked further and James Turnball went over for his second try of the match, the conversion was missed however leaving us down by a point.

Jules then decided he needed a 10 minute break behind the opponents posts and Harlow kicked the resulting penalty to give them a 21 - 17 lead with about 10 minutes left. The whole of this time was spent with Welwyn putting Harlow under a lot of pressure, with Jonno running half the length of the pitch to score, only to be pulled up for a forward pass. Banksy and Biffa had a blindside attack but neither had the pace to finish the attack, and Mark Harris was bundled into the corner flag from a line out move. However, we were unable to finish our moves and ended up ruing a number of missed opportunities throughout the match in a game we could have won.

After the match the theme was “extravagant headwear” and there were a number of cowboy hats (including a lovely pink one from Turnball), flat caps, Cossack hats, jester’s hats, crash helmets, miners wigs, navy hats and a Darth Vader helmet. We moved one from the Harlow clubhouse to Webbo’s pub for a few pints and then eventually back to Welwyn.

Rob