Old Blues vs Worth Old Boys

The Old Blues were on the road again heading down to take on the Worth Old Boys at the Old Reedonians ground in Whiteley Village. We had a feeling that this was always going to be a much tougher game than it looked “on paper” and boy, were we right... The Blues started brightly enough, with James “the Mouth” Pickard going over in the corner in the first couple of minutes but that just seemed to stir the WOBs and the game suddenly went up a couple of notches in terms of intensity and tempo, as evidenced by the WOBs fly half and our scrum half both going off injured in the first quarter. The WOBs answered the Old Blues try quickly with a penalty and then enjoyed a period of sustained pressure where they recycled the ball beautifully to run in two tries and round them off with another penalty. Some of our supporters would have been excused for wondering what the hell was going on, as was TC – although he didn’t put it so mildly…. However, the Blues held their nerve and took the ball back up the hill to secure 3 more points with a penalty kick and almost nicked a try just before the death but the ball was judged to be held up. Score at half time was 18-8 to WOBs. The second half started with the Blues having been freshly (and deservedly) roasted at half time but we now had gravity on our side and quickly got on the score sheet when the pack won a WOBs scrum 5m out and ran in a try. Another score in the corner followed, but the next 10-15mins saw WOBs guard their lead with a combination of some excellent territorial play helped in no short measure by the Old Blues incurring a penalty count worthy of the current England team. This culminated in the WOBs extending their lead with another well taken penalty and this, finally, seemed to get the Blues focussed on the task at hand. For the final quarter, the Blues clicked and some great combination play between an increasingly dominant pack and a back line enjoying a bit more space managed to unlock the WOBs defence twice more with about 5mins left on the clock. A solid take from the kick off saw each Old Blues forward handle the ball at least twice and work our way sufficiently up the park to unleash the backs once again to secure the result with about 2 mins remaining. The final score was 32-21 to Old Blues. This was by no means a vintage Old Blues performance but I’ll take that score every day and we did very well in the end to maintain our composure against a side I expect to see competing in Surrey 2 in the near future. HdM went to Alex Demenis who has been enjoying an outstanding season and was simply immense at no.8.