Match Report v Wellington
Click here for photos of the match Wellington College
The 1stXV kicked off their Hurricanes festival campaign with a match against traditional foes Wellington College. This has been an excellent barometer of progress in the past and after what had been a heavy week in terms of workload, the team was well aware of the upcoming challenge. Despite this, the team started slowly and Wellington made the most of early mistakes to grab a try inside the first few minutes. This had the desired effect of waking the team from their pre-match stupor and our attack game started to gain fluidity. The increased accuracy and understanding of options on attack has been steadily developing over the last two weeks. While it is far from the finished product, the team is showing great signs. With our ball runners being very direct with their play and enjoying good support, it allows our backs to play with more time and space and the decision making is improving. Tries came fairly steadily throughout the game as the territory we earned through good defence and accurate kicking started to tell on a pressured Wellington side. Our defence has been our strength thus far with good line speed and aggression and again it was a useful tool for gaining territory without having the ball. There remain periods of inaccuracies and this resulted in Wellington scoring four tries and us giving up other opportunities but in the end we continued attacking and crossed the line for nine tries of our own, comfortably winning 57-20.
There are two more rounds in the Hurricanes festival with our next game being against Scots College in Hastings on Saturday.
Points Scorers:
Tries: Tamati Ruawai x 2, Korie Winters, Chance Malu, Flyn Yates, Ethan Johansen, Bryn Wilson, Bryn Gordon, Stewart Cruden
Conversions: Stewart Cruden x5 , Jayden Keelan
