U16; Bury St Edmunds 0 v Woodbridge 27

A hard fought battle between forwards, finished off by the Woodbridge U16 backs.

With a midday kick off on the Bury 1^st team pitch, this was always going to be anything but a friendly! Bury although going down to qualify through the Plate this year for the Cup Finals have shown their mettle and  blasted through their qualification and put a dangerously close loss against Wymondham on their score sheet.

Woodbridge started badly from the kick off with cold hands knocking backwards and putting ourselves under lots of pressure from an eager hunting party of the Bury loose forwards. Then when we did manage to steady ourselves a couple of clearing kicks going astray from the side of the boot put us back into a scurrying defence against a very determined Bury side.

For a good 20/25 minutes the rugby was played 50:50 in both ends without score, until the big Woodbridge forwards got a sniff of the Bury try line and pod after pod attacked their line and Tom Jermy went over and dabbed the ball down on the try line white wash, but it wasn’t seen by the Referee who called play on and a few moments later James Owens grounded the ball in front of the Ref to get our first 5 points.

A sweet and sour moment as almost immediately James was given 7 minutes in the bin for retaliation after being kneed in the head.

Down to 14 men, with the Captain off the pitch you might of thoughts heads would have dropped, but the forwards had gained momentum releasing better ball to the backs who very started to play wide expansive running rugby and after a dazzling display of off-loading and support play Jake ran in for a score in the far right hand corner.

Stunned Bury then leaked another try in exactly the same place as Harry Mitchell burst along the touch offloaded to Marcus who in turn offloaded to Toby Stowe who had just come onto the pitch and fresh legs powered over to score..

Half Time and back to 15 players again.

To Bury’s credit they didn’t roll over and upped their intensity giving us very little room to work in and spoiling to great effect and probably stopping another try or two. The Woodbridge backs continued with their dazzling display of handling and communication. But the final two tries went to Tom Jermy from a penalty, taking a pop ball to smash through their line and lastly a classic No. 8 try scored off the back of the scrum by James O under the posts for Elliott to slot a further 2 points.

A try saving tackle by a Bury back on Guy, left the tackler unconscious on the ground and the game was called to a halt a few minutes early. Gladly the lad recovered to be helped off the pitch and we all wish him well in his recovery.

Men of the Match went to Guy for his distribution and big defensive effort and George for a great display of support play and running, backing himself and taking the outside line when he could to great effect.