When we played Northolt on their patch two months ago, we had what was probably the low point of our season, and lost a game that most of us would rather forget. We knew that this couldn’t happen again if we were to keep our promotion quest on the road. In order to do this, we had to improve our work all around the park, from scrum to tackling.

Quintin kicked to Northolt to start the game, and we remained camped in Northolt’s half, as we would be for most of the game. The fist few scrums went well, with none of the reversing that occurred in our previous encounter. It wasn’t long before the Quintin pressure told, and Shrige was able to dive over from a well worked back move. Andy Little scored soon afterwards – a dart down the blindside found little defence, and after a couple of sidesteps (for the ladies), he scored Quintin’s second. Northolt’s scrum started to improve, and Quintin found themselves on the back foot. Cooney’s accurate hooking and Andy’s handling at the base of the scrum kept us out of trouble, but we may not always be as lucky. Quintin went into the break 12-0, still not yet firing on all cylinders.

The 2nd half was considerably better. Brendan complimented his brutal tackling with a superbly executed chip and chase to score a wonderful solo try, the likes of which Quintin haven’t seen since OsboUrne was in his prime a few years back. Dogger was watching this on the touchline with young Luke, and was determined to show his young son that the deviant portrayed in the News of the World dogging sting was not the real Dogger. Northolt were next to score, and when they kicked off, Andy Little was well positioned to catch (something Watson failed to do in the first half) and pop to a storming Dogger, who ran half the pitch before passing to the girls allowing Sanger to cross the line. This broke Northolt’s spirit, and Watson crossed the line soon afterwards after some weak tacking. The final try of the day was similar to Sanger’s, with Northolt’s defence seemingly opening up allowing Quintin to run the length of the pitch giving Brendan his second try of the day.

A reasonable performance, but we must improve the scrummage if we are to compete in the higher leagues

Man of the Match: Brendan – Awesome in both attack and defence
Girl of the Match: Deviant Dogger – for making the rest of us look bad with his running after only being on the pitch for thirty seconds.