Lydney lose close encounter
Report and Pictures by Roger Pike
Bridgewater & Albion 19 Lydney 13
Lydney will not get many easier chances this season for an away win. On a wet and windy day they dominated most of the game but some knock on’s and poor executions of play saw them go down to a narrow defeat. Playing with the wind and slope advantage the Severnsiders started the brighter dominating the opening encounters and were camped in the Bridgewater half but after 15 minutes an Alex Peel penalty was all they had to show for their efforts. The Severnsiders continued to pile on the pressure and were dominating the set piece causing rapid retreat for the Bridge pack. From a good driving maul on the 22m line Kurt Brown guided the pack over the line to extend Lydneys lead out to 0 – 8. The Severnsiders then had their only lapse in play after 25 minutes giving easy ball to the hosts who took their chance going nearly the length of the pitch for winger Dom Thorne try which was converted for 7 – 8. With the elements helping the Severnsiders continued to play all the rugby in the Bridgewater half but some poor handling and far too many kicks saw many good opportunities go begging. With half time approaching Lydneys error count continued when camped near the try line and could still not cross the host’s line so a slender lead did not look enough.
The second half play completely changed, from the kick off Lydney dropped the restart and the following scrum saw a well worked try for Simon Honet to score and the hosts were in front at 14 – 8. Playing against a strong wind and driving rain Lydney upped their game just to stay in touch and ground out some hard yards with their forwards, however any errors were immediately punished with big raking kicks down field from the hosts to regain the territory. The Severnsiders did win a penalty on the 22m but the Peel kick fell agonisingly short against the strong wind. The forwards battled hard and it was very unlucky for impressive Harry Brown to be yellow carded who appeared on numerous occasions to have won good turnover ball but not legally according to the official. With 14 players Lydney dug deep and saw out the next 10 minutes playing much the better rugby. Having to run the ball back against the wind Tai Lakabuka, Henry Sleeman and Conal Mills all had good runs in the Severnsiders back line to gain good yardage. Deep into the final five minutes the Severnsiders needed a score and it was the forwards who rescued the situation, a storming run by Dave Bennet set up a number of forward drives to cross the Hosts 22m and Harry Brown picked up to beat a couple of tacklers and score to make it 14 – 13 with the conversion to follow. Unfortunately for the Severnsiders a fairly simple kick was missed and so any chance of the away win. Chasing the game in the last couple of minutes saw another handling error which gifted the Hosts a score to end the match at 19 – 13.
Coach Lee Fortey commented ‘first half was fine, we totally dominated, probably kicked too often and spurned 3 or 4 easy try opportunities which have a habit of biting you later, we needed to have been out of sight by half time given the huge advantage from the elements. The second half was always going to be tough into the wind but after gifting them an early try I thought we battled hard and should still have won the game. Most of our fixtures have been away from Regentsholme so it will be good in the coming weeks to get a run of home fixtures which hopefully will get us moving up the table’.