Bowdon vsManchester, what would 2012 bring?

We arrived at Bowdon and were marched up to ‘the Ponderosa’, one of Bowdon’s somewhat inclined pitches, the design I’m sure to help with drainage, but not the best if you have to work against the gradient.

We had a bit of a warm up and the first 15 went out to face the music and the gradient. The game kicked off and before we even knew what was happening we were three tries and a conversion down, the panic set in amongst the coaches. Very quickly we made some position changes to what was obviously not working. This seemed to settle the boys a little and they began to stand up and be counted, for the remainder of this 20 we did not ship any more tries and we managed one of our own which was duly converted, the first 20 finished 17 to 7 in favour of Bowdon. We had suffered as we do far too regularly the consequence of not getting out of bed!

The second 20, the coaches made a number of changes as we had promised and put some of the newer lads on, the momentum from the end of the first half was with us and we had the slope on our side too. The boys dug in and it came together with tries coming from different players in the squad and the second 20 in which we were much more confident ended 19 – 5 to Manchester (Bowdon 22 Manchester 26 overall)

The final third and more changes were made and the slope faced us again, Bowdon could not deal with Tom Walsh and every time the ball came to him, comments of ‘here we go…’ came from the Bowdon parents. Gaining confidence across the whole team Manchester pushed further, scoring 3 tries to Bowdon’s two with one conversion (15- 12 to Manchester). Totalling it all up, across the hour the final score was Bowdon 34 – Manchester 41.
As a coach what impressed me most was the fact that we did not give up. The boys raised their game and came good against a Bowdon squad that historically would beat us in every fixture, we managed to a draw last season and come through with good win this season. I consider this as a good measure of the progress we have made and the star of better things to come.
Apologies, I do not have all the scorers, we had tries form Tom Walsh, Ciaran Booth, Greg Stewart with conversions from Tom Jones. If I have missed anyone, please correct me.

Man of the Match Tom Walsh.