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Bletchley - Combined squad with Mens Own
Final Score: 10-12

Another game where we played as a combined team with Mens Own to give as many players as possible as much game time as we could. We took a strong but small squad of 6 Tows players to join forces with the Mens Own players for a game against Bletchley.

After a rather nervous start from the kick off the players quickly settled into some excellent passages of play, winning a lot of ruck ball and looking very dangerous every time we moved the ball wide. The first try started with the ball on our own 22, we won the ball and moved it quickly to the right and after a good break by Matt Chalcraft and good support from Thomas Edwards, we quickly won the ensuing ruck and this time moved the ball left along the back line to give Joe Sinclair the chance to take on his opposite number. He ran straight and strong and scored in the left hand corner. This left a difficult conversion which Alex Dennis kicked very well but it dropped a bit short.

From the restart the ball went long and we did not gather cleanly leading to a set scrum on our 22. Bletchley had by far the bigger pack, but due to some great hooking by Miles Chandler and good technical scrummaging by all the forwards we did manage to win a lot of scrum ball during the afternoon.

For the next 5 minutes we were defending deep in our own 22 and held our line very well for a number of phases of play, but the pressure told and we conceded a try to a strong forward drive, which was then converted.

The good news was that heads did not go down and we were soon back on the attack in the Bletchley half. Some good driving runs, excellent rucking and ball retention by the forwards led to us getting quick clean ball on their 22. It was moved right swiftly by Alfie Birch and Alex Dennis to Matt Chalcraft who broke two tackles to score in the right corner. Again a difficult conversion that Alex got very close with, but fell just short. Leaving the score at 10-7 at half time.

The second half was a less open game and while we did have a good share of possession did not use it as wisely as in the first half. Tending to go on individual runs rather than using the pace we had out wide. We did create a number of chances and were unlucky not to score on two occasions when the final pass did not go quite to hand.

With only a couple of minutes left in the game we conceded a penalty just outside our 22. Bletchley gave it to their strongest running forward, we stood back rather than attack him and allowed him to run through a number of tackles to score in the left hand corner.

Although we only had a couple of minutes remaining we chased the restart well and created two more chances to score the winning try but unfortunately could not finish either so eventually lost the game 10-12.

A rather disappointing result, especially given some of the excellent rugby we played. The players worked very well as a team and the spirit in which we played was excellent. Well done to all.