Picture: Joshua Rowe.
RUGBY 1st XV defending courageously and despite two tries by the opposition — kept well to me sidelines by our own backs' and back-row's excellent tackling — a 9-8 win was our just reward. Two more defeats took us up to half term. The first day back after half term produced our second win of the season against a young touring side from Hampton School. The 27-7 scoreline included a brace of excellent tries for the fly-half Robert Crossley: he caught his own chip to score his first try, and then a thirty metre side-stepping weave to the line untouched through half the opposition gave him his second. There were other splendid individual tries from Jason Morris off a set-piece penalty move and from the scrum-half Alex Deighton, who ran some twenty metres from the base of the scrum to score with two people hanging round his legs, as well as a splendid back-passing movement for the winger Gavin Proudley to score in the corner, just on half-time.
The 1989 season had only two old colours returning — Richard Griggs as captain and Philip Brown as vicecaptain. Their leadership and determination ensured that a difficult season went as well as it could: all the players gave one hundred per cent on the field, and approached training, both for fitness and unit skills, in as thorough and committed a way as any group in recent years. As die statistics suggest, wins were hard to come by, but pride and determination were never in doubt, and all the games were played out to the full even though we were often outgunned. The opening non-school matches were narrow defeats, despite a brace of ingenious individual tries by John Suckling against the Retiring Captain's XV. In the next two games the leadership and skill of the captain, Richard Griggs, were sorely missed as we went down rather heavily against much more mobile yet much bigger sets of forwards. The next game, against Barnard Castle, gained us our first win of the term. An even first half saw us turn around 3-0 leaders, thanks to a penalty near the start by Philip Brown. Almost straight from the kick-off a drive by Richard Griggs and a surging run by his back-row companion Jason Morris saw a score converted by Brown to put us 9-0 up. The last quarter of the game found us
A series of four losses ensued against some traditionally difficult old enemies. Almough the scorelines seemed most one-sided, territorially we often had the lion's share but were simply outpushed in the pack or drawn into an overlap in the back division, which cost us dearly. Proof of the unstinting determination shown by all the players was a win against Ashville by the narrowest of scores. However, I am unable to comment 52
