Recap
Kempston started their league campaign in the perfect way yesterday by getting a win on the road against Bletchley 2nd’s. Following our training match last week and a really intense training session on Thursday, confidence was good going into the game, but we didn’t get off to the best of starts. Indiscipline and too many forwards at the breakdowns led to Bletchley getting the first score of the game, which was converted. Kempston needed to get the ball under control and use the pace of the backs, and after a period of sustained pressure, Ewan Casey broke the Bletchley lines and scored under the posts.The half time whistle went with the score 7-5.
Following some changes at half time and some words of encouragement from coach Richard Fairhead, Kempston went out in the second half with a point to prove. An injury to stand in hooker Steve Burnage meant that the game went to uncontested scrums. This meant that we could finally get some clean ball from the scrums. This led to our second try of the game, with the backs showing their passing skills to devastating affect, Corentin Julie going over in the corner. It wasn’t long before Kempston extended their lead with another score, this time David Cowl touching down following some strong running from both forwards and backs. Bletchley attacked strongly from then on, using their big players to try and break the Kempston defence. They got their reward late in the second half with a try in the corner, however despite a retaken conversion due to Josh Thomas attempting to put their kicker off, their kick was missed. Kempston then spent the last few minutes camped in the Bletchley half. Final score 15-12 in favour of Kempston.
This was a really important win for Kempston to mark the start of our league campaign, especially against last seasons league winners. Whilst the win was good, there is much to work on in terms of our performance and we left a number of tries out on the pitch.
We move on to next week with a rearranged fixture against Olney 3’s where we will look to put together a run of good results.
Man of the match
Richard Lovesey – a truly heroic performance from the Kempston stalwart. Tackling anything that moved, making so many metres from carries. A wonderful performance
Silly billy of the week
Josh Thomas – for shouting at the kicker, leading to a retake of the conversion. Whoops!