Mowden suffer badly in Billingham game

Mowden U14's suffered a heavy defeat and also incurred many injuries at Billingham.

For the first 15 minutes the forwards contained BIllingham and it was telling that Billingham's number 8 did not score a single try from the pick-up from the scrum, with Jonatahn O'Neil preventing one attempt from a 5m scrum.

With the forwards once again dominating the scrums, Mowden had lots of ball for the backs, but Billingham backs took advantage of Mowden having too many forwards in the backs and closed Mowden down quickly, and started to turn over the ball. Before long Mowden created gaps and Billingham started to exploit the ball with good sensible kicking and quick passing, it was not long before they had 7 tries ran past Mowden.

This also came at the expense of Mowden players with the scrag tackle causing many. Chris Cran went out with a severley bruised hip, Callum Buckley went out after an extremely strong tackle from their number 8.

While the injuries mounted in the backs it was the forwards who stuck to their role and still dominated and frustrated in the rucks, mauls and still dominated the scrums.

When Mowden kept the ball through sensible picks and drives they could move 20-30m at a time, but could not penetrate Billingham's try line, although they did have a try held up.

Billingham finally cleared their lines and ran through to score the final try of the game.

For their efforts, the forwards were the men of the match, despite some bigger opposition and questionable play around the rucks which the referee caught most of.

The new policy (as the trophies keep getting smashed is for the coach to buy the man of the match a drink.

So
Jonathan O'Neill
John Allison
Dom Morgan
Robert Lawson
James Keough
Tom Ducker

were all awarded man of the match. Their pick and drive never stopped for the duration of the game.