Lions 17 - 10 Boro
On an overcast, rain-swept day at Bretton the City’s two vets teams did battle in front of a sizeable crowd of about 40 people in order to establish
the bragging rights as to who has the best team, who’s City this is, did you nick any of our players, who’s that ? I don’t recognise him etc.
The Lions, not having played together since the good old days of about 12 years ago, opened with a 10 minute spell of ‘not really playing’, followed by 20 minutes of ‘we’re in the right part of the pitch but cannot figure out how to score’ which, after half time, descended into ‘some good play there but we have to be really careful we don’t give this one away’.
It’s fair to say that the boys from Boro upped their game for this one, joining rucks and mauls with such ferocity that they often could not help falling over and blocking the ball, an unfortunate circumstance which led to some discomfort in the Lions ranks but showed the intent with which they approached the game.
Your correspondent understands that some of the Lions players were under strict orders from their wives never to play that stupid game again, and thus had just popped out for a pint of milk and a paper, so names will not be named here, not even for a team sheet, but suffice to say that CP powered his way over for the first try, SS powered his way in similar fashion for the last try, and in between someone carved through the Boro defence to score the middle try and convert it, thus adding 17 Lions points to the score board in total.
It was an extremely competitive game and could have gone either way but it didn’t and in reality the Lions had the Lions share of possession and territory throughout. T played really well on his return from 2 years of self imposed exile, even Welshman TH shone (except for that stupid, stupid pass) and LH marshalled the backs and tried to do the same with the referee until told in no uncertain terms to shut up. MS did a fine job with the food afterwards, to complement a good game on the park, and P, PH, AF, CT (There’s only one CT), PC, ML, JH, SS and that bloke from Deeping all played well on a boggy pitch.
I think some of the Boro players may have played quite well, they were certainly up for this one before losing their crown as the City’s premier Vets side, but I will leave that for the inimitable RW to describe and place in the anals of their history.
Our thanks to MW for refereeing. Good man.
Boro scored 10 points.