And it all started off so promisingly, as well…
This is going to be fairly short; I made a few notes at the time, but with no replays available, I’m relying on my memory (and that ain’t what it used to be). Errors are, therefore, more likely than usual.
One note that I made after Alex Wills’s try was to the effect that I had seen more inventiveness and application in the first ten minutes than I saw in the whole of the game in Newcastle. And I stand by that: they came out with real intent and threatened to blow Bristol away not only for the first ten minutes, but for most of the first half.
We saw guys cutting lines, drawing defenders, probing, shifting the point of attack… You know, all those good things that we were promised and that we want to see. And it paid off when a sweeping move from right to left across the field ended with Wills running in a simple try, excellently converted by Davies.
Then, about ten minutes later, Reedy broke through for the second try and a fourteen-point lead.
In hindsight, you could suggest that we should have made more of that early dominance. It’s not always easy to tell when the bulk of the action is happening a hundred metres away, but it looked as if we should have been much further ahead by the time Bristol started coming back into the game at around the twenty-five minute mark.
Certainly, the scrum and lineout were doing well, and we were (shock, horror!) getting the best of the penalty count.
I missed Bristol’s first try, since that pint of John Willie’s finest I’d had at The Brook earlier had caught up with me. I do know that, by the time I’d left to refill the lager pumps, Brizz had started mounting some more effective attacks and were spending time in our half. That they missed the conversion would prove to be the difference at the end of the match.
Then came the second half…
If we thought that spending so much of the first half watching from a hundred metres away would translate to watching most of the second half from twenty metres, we were to be sorely disappointed.
For twenty minutes, Bristol did to us what we did to them, pulling the score to within two points in the process. That turnaround seemed to send Sale back into their shells and make them revert to type. We started kicking more and running predictable straight lines into contact, rather than seeking to pass and shift the ball around. Also, penalties 🙄.
A rare second-half foray into the Bristol half saw Arron restore our nine-point lead following a well-worked move off of a 5-metre scrum.
And then, within five minutes, a silly penalty gave the initiative back to Bristol, who pulled it back to squeaky-bum territory. They had a chance to snatch it with a late penalty, but it was always a long shot (literally) and fell short. Somehow, we held on to the end without too many more scares, and we went home with a win that, even so, felt unsatisfying.
I made a final note: That was less a win, more a failure to lose.
I’d be interested in seeing a breakdown of what all the penalties against Sale have been given for. I would guess that a good 90% of them are either holding on or offside. Those seem to me to be our major problems this season: too quick in defence and too slow to the breakdown.
Arron Reed had a good game and was probably the pick of the team. Hanson and Davies looked good as well (at least, up to the point where Dom started box kicking possession away).
I was mystified that David Opoku-Fordjour didn’t get some time on the pitch, especially since Tom Roebuck became increasingly anonymous as the game went on. Has Buck fully recovered from his earlier injury? I would have thought that bringing on someone with serious wheels (I’ve watched DO-F playing for FC – he’s fast) for twenty minutes at the end might have turned things around a lot more comfortably.
All that aside, I want to finish by acknowledging the playing of the Last Post before the game. It was, as ever, very moving and served as a stark reminder that, when all is said and done, this is only a game. In the context of that ceremony, it doesn’t matter.
