Tarleton 0 – 80 Didsbury Toc H

Fourteen tries condemned the newly promoted Tarleton to by far their biggest defeat of the season, with five tries coming from winger Dave Hoare.

The game was played in good conditions, despite a fairly strong wind, and Didsbury again had the luxury of naming a very strong squad for the match. Toc H have a plethora of quality back row forwards this season, and had the luxury of naming Dave Foster and Aidan Murphy amongst the replacements.

The game began badly for Didsbury, an immediate knock-on from the kick off, but after this Toc H didn’t look back. The deadlock was soon broken by fly-half Euan Wilder. A well worked lineout saw quick ball find Wilder, who raced through a gap and round the fullback to score by the posts. Tarleton went down to fourteen players, when a player was sin binned, and from a scrum number 8 James Eames crashed over from close range. Eames soon doubled his tally when he shook off a number of would be tacklers to score under the posts. The tries started to come at regular intervals, and every player was keen to get the ball in hand. Further tries came from Dave Hoare (5), Sean Bishop (2), Pete Davies (2), Phil Cooper and impressive substitute Sam Wallis.

Every player performed well, with notable contributions by second rows Cooper and Walker, and man of the match centre Dylan Williams.

Head coach, Steve Popoola, was pleased with the performance, but will still find areas to work on in training. If Didsbury had added the nine missed conversions the scoreline would have been extended to 98-0!

Next Saturday Didsbury welcome Birchfield to Ford Lane, 3pm kick off. Toc H will be eager to maintain their unbeaten home record which now stands at well over twelve months,

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REPORT COURTESY OF WWW.TARLETONRUGBY.COM:

This was going to be another tough match (it should get a little easier over the next couple of weeks) and watching the Didsbury side warm up I could see that they were 'up for it'! I've been watching Senior Amateur Rugby for many years and I have to say that this was the best team performance that I have seen in the last 5 years.

These players probably have an average age of 27, have played together for some time and are at the peak of their fitness (with no exceptions). For the first 10 minutes the game was fairly even but in reality Didsbury were probably just looking for a weakness and after 12 minutes they found it.

They had three or four players who were rather stocky to say the least, No.12, No.5 and No.8 and these 3 kept driving at the Tarleton defensive line drawing two players in to bring them down and popping the ball out of the tackle to an equally strong runner - something had to give and Tarleton's defence crumbled..

Tarleton still made a few hundred tackles during the game but so slick were the ball carriers that only on about 5 occasions did the ball actually go to ground when the tackle was made. They were all adept at passing out of the tackle and often had 2 options at the time - this is hours of practice on their training night coming to fruition. Most of their tries came from this sort of play - we held them at the set pieces but in open play they were awesome and all over us like a rash. The sheer physicality of all of the Didsbury players was difficult for our smaller players to deal with. Tarleton still played through to the end and the match ended with Tarleton breaking out of their own 22 only for a pass to be intercepted by a Didsbury centre and the final score of the game was converted.

This is where we should be looking to be in 2 or 3 years time when our young squad has beefed up and more importantly played together longer to develop the sort of understanding that Didsbury have. More players at training would be a start.

This was a sobering experience for many of the players who have probably never been thrashed like this before; had their kicker had his kicking boots on the defeat could have been even heavier.

There were positives, we defended well for long periods of the game but whenever a tackle was missed ( 1 in 12 or so) Didsbury were in to score. We need to work on better ball-retention at the breakdown as if the opposition don't have the ball they can't score. Our scrums and line-outs were still steady and our tackling on the whole was good. We were just beaten by a bigger, better side on the day. Our target when we go to their place will be to play to our strengths not theirs!

Next week we are away at Old Bedians who have a similar playing record to ourselves and we should be looking to come away with something from this fixture.