In what was a big home game for Royals as a club, with club stalwart Mark “Doogie” Young playing his 500th senior match for the club in 4th grade, 3rd grade came in really needing a win after two losses in the last two matches.
The game started off well with Royals showing early dominance in both the forwards and backs, which led to an early try with Ben Smith diving over in the corner. Continuing from the kickoff, 3rds played with structure and good phase play to march up the field with the back row making good inroads in to the Eagles line, which was capitalised on by the backs with Tyler Durden Meredith Brown breaking the line for a well worked try.
After a bit of back and forth and a few silly errors, Royals managed to get on the front foot again from a lineout steal and barnstorming run by Noah “Big Buck” Bouquiaux, gave space to the backs with Sam M cutting through the Eagles defence on the half way line and putting on the afterburners to outpace the cover defence and score in the corner. Half time score of 19-0 seemed a reasonable return for Royals but there could have been more if a few passes stuck.
2nd half started off similarly to the first with Royals making the gain line almost every carry and breaks to Liam and Sam marching the side up the field and Nick Tankey controlling the backs to find space regularly. In what was some smart footy, after spotting the Eagles defence being out of position, Josh put through a kick in to space for Tyler Durden Meredith Brown to score his second try next to the posts, Royals up 26-0.
After letting in an silly Eagles try, Royals regrouped once more with the scrum becoming ever more dominant, holding the Eagles loose forwards to create space for Swainy to slice through the Eagles backs defence to score. Really starting to open the Eagles tiring defence Noah smashed it up the middle carrying multiple defenders for 20m before being brought down. Off the back of that, Royals had the Eagles line shot and in what proved a masterstroke, the “Diverse Masseuse”, Justin Vandenbergh had Joshy B give him the ball on the left despite a 4 man overlap on the right. This clearly bamboozled the Eagles remaining defensive players, with Jussie carrying a few over the line to score.
With Supercoach Chan getting most of his subs on as we got deeper into the second half, Jayden “The Train” Peckett showed he could do multiple things at once by making a line break, brushing off defenders and putting his jersey on all at the same time. Luke Twashie Fisher was also showing his rugby intelligence by cleaning out unsuspecting Eagles players at the ruck, moving so fast they didn’t even see him coming, driving in low for some textbook rugby.
To finish off a good day for the team, Swainy once again went through the line before drawing the defence and putting Liam away for a 20m run to the line to make the final score 43-7. Really good work from the entire forward pack set the platform for the pretty boys to do their thing out back. Still a few areas to work on at training but definitely good to get back in to the winners stalls and 3rd grade will build off that with tough games coming up against Wests and the Bye in the next two weeks.
Points
3 Noah Bouquiaux
2 Jacob Mann
1 Nick Tankey
