Sandal Cougars 29 Pontefract 12
Sandal Cougars travelled to their West Yorkshire rivals looking for their 6th straight league win. The Cougars welcomed back Johny Sewell and Jamie Heron from lengthy lay-offs and Tom Hurst who was making his debut in the back row.
The match kicked off and The Cougars wanted a fast and explosive start to set the tone for the whole match. Unforced errors, meant that this did not happen and there was no real structure to The Cougars game plan. However, Dan Hodson showed some great footwork and good speed to score, 5-0.
Along with the unforced errors, The Cougars were giving away silly penalties and making real hard work of the game. Encouraging words from Brett Hunt to his brother Liam Hunt, meant that Liam cut a superb line off Alex Seckham to scorch through the defence and his off load to Dan Hodson allowed the stand-off to score his second of the match, conversion added, 12-0.
With 5 minutes until half-time, Sandal allowed themselves to be rattled by Pontefract’s ageing No: 8, who took a cheap shot at a Sandal player. The original penalty stood to Pontefract and from the resulting lineout, they scored a good push over try from 10 metres out, 12-5.
At half-time, Dave Bott spoke to the whole squad, rather like a father of squabbling children, and from here Sandal kicked on a gear.
Good scrummaging, a positive feature of the whole game was allowing The Cougars backs to carry the ball forward and cross the gain line. From such a move Andy Evetts showed good speed and to score, 17-5. Sandal continued to pile the pressure on their opponents and John Livesey showed tremendous pace to score from inside the Pontefract half, 22-5.
Pontefract wanted to get back into the game and their backs were doing their best, running everything and taking quick tap penalties. Their outside centre took a very good line, and with good speed scored to make it 22-12.
Sandal were to have the last score and it went to the geriatric, Charlie Pearce who supported Liam Hunt well and scored under the posts, the conversion was added by Edge and The Cougars won 29-12. Pearce also scored 8 out of 10 for his dive! Not the best of performances, but the lads dug deep to out score their opponents 5 tries to 2.
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