Match Report

Our last league game of the season saw us take on old adversaries Cheshunt whereby a victory would ensure promotion to London North-West 2 at the first attempt regardless of other results. A stern encounter was expected, going by our previous matches against Cheshunt, and so our preparation was nothing but focused. We kicked off the game but appeared a bit too eager as we launched ourselves ahead of our kicker. The eventual scrum went our way after some excellent work by our pack and we continued to dominate the set-piece throughout the game.

Within 5 minutes we were 6 – 0 after 2 penalty attempts converted by the club stalwart Chris Smith. This was soon followed by our first try which had up 11 – 0. Despite dominating play for the first quarter we eased off a bit losing our structure somewhat. Cheshunt came back into the game and soon replied with 3 points via a penalty which for us amounted to something of a wake up call. We got back to playing in Cheshunt’s half and dominated from there on with the forwards arriving in numbers at every breakdown and the backline opening up the gaps out wide. Try wise the floodgates opened from there on and we rarely looked back.

Cheshunts cause was not helped by them going down to 14 players due to a lack of substitutes in the second half which we capitalized on to run in even more tries. With so many tries and scorers it would be difficult to list yet alone recall all. My apologies! However, there were a number of notable highlights. Chris Smith in his first game back since sustaining an injury a few weeks ago showed us that there was still life left in the old war horse with a fine display of kicking in-between the posts and from hand.

Ben Collins waded in with an impressive hat-trick of tries (perhaps the first Welshman in the history of West London to do so!!!) which took his tally to 5 after a handful of first team starts. Though perhaps one of the most impressive tries was scored by the ever consistent Matt Roxburgh who burst through from the Cheshunt 22 brushing all that opposed him aside to score under the posts. He neatly followed this up with a conversion too.We applied ourselves throughout and were clinical in our approach to the last seconds in what was a very encouraging performance by all culminating in promotion and a very fine end to our league season.(RB)