A Tough Afternoon on the Croft

The South Yorkshire side are currently second in the league, so a tough afternoon was always on the cards.

The home team started well and were soon attacking in their opponents’ half but were penalised for holding on to the ball on the floor and the visitors were able to clear their lines. They worked their way into the Burton half but knocked the ball forward. However, Burton were penalised for a front row offence at the ensuing scrum, so the Sheffield kicker kicked a goal from the 22 metre line to open the scoring.
The visitors were soon on the attack again and a sidestep by the fly half took him through the defence where he found the flanker in support to run in and score the first try. The kicker added the extra points.

It was not long before the visitors were on the score sheet again, this time through a simple missed tackle in the centre. The kicker failed with the conversion attempt.

Although Burton were dominant in the set scrums, they were unable to do much with the ball and found it difficult to penetrate the strong and well organised Sheffield defence. Eventually they won a penalty on the visitors’ five metre line and chose a scrum. Sheffield were penalised for a front row offence, so Burton chose another scrum. After the third front row offence the referee sent the perpetrator to the sin bin for ten minutes but still refused to award the penalty try. Burton were eventually forced to pick the ball up and pass it along the back line to winger Alex Nesbitt who scored in the corner. Will Simpson failed with a difficult conversion attempt from the touchline. This was the last kick of the half, so the half time score was 5 -15.

From the restart Burton went on the attack but still found it difficult to penetrate the Sheffield defence. However, they were awarded a penalty on the 22 metre line when the visitors were offside. Simpson kicked the goal.

This was to be the home team’s last score of the game however as the game degenerated into a scrappy affair with both sides making mistakes. Captain Dominic Taylor was yellow carded for killing the ball and towards the end of the match received a red card for a second yellow card offence.

In an unsatisfactory last quarter Sheffield were able to score twice more. The first of these was from a lineout on the Burton 5 metre line when they won the ball and drove over to score a try which was not converted. They were then awarded a penalty and kicked for goal to make sure that Burton had to get three scores to win the game. The home team did not really threaten to do that in any case, so the final score was Burton 8 Sheffield 23.