Injuries and unavailability meant Phoenix started the match with back-rower Dan Morris at hooker (and despite his darts player physique, his arrows on the day left a lot to be desired!) and a make-shift second row of young prop Adam Tamanis and veteran Mannie Skidmore. Despite offering more in the loose, when it came to the set piece against a bigger Wath pack, this proved to be Phoenix’s downfall as Wath were able to set up a perfect platform for their backs and regularly disrupt Phoenix’s ball.

Despite this, Phoenix started brightly and a couple of early penalties were snapped up by the in-form Ben Millar to give Phoenix an early 6-0 lead. However, for the remainder of the half Wath enjoyed the vast majority of possession, although well organised Phoenix defence prevented them from making an impression on the scoreboard until right at the very end of the half when they took advantage of Phoenix being reduced to 14 men to score a converted try following winger Dan Greenslade’s (very harsh!) yellow card.

Only 5 minutes into the second half, Phoenix had another man sent to the sin bin as Ben Millar this time fell foul of the young referee. Wath again made the most of the numerical advantage to score 2 more tries in this period to take the score to 19-6.

As the half wore on and with a full complement of 15 men, Phoenix began to enjoy some more possession and territory and following a string of penalties it was one of the Wath players who this time saw yellow. This gave Phoenix some parity in the scrums and it was from a scrum in the Wath 22 that Phoenix were able to feed their backs to execute a strike move that eventually saw centre Craig Deakin go over under the posts to pull the score back to 19-13. With 5 minutes to go Phoenix finally began to show what they could do as they pressed the Wath line hard for a winning try.

With almost the last play of the game Phoenix won a penalty which they kicked to the corner. From the resulting lineout flanker Carey Thomas claimed the ball only to be taken out dangerously in the air, resulting in another penalty but only a talking to for the offending player – the penalty was again kicked to the corner, but this time Wath were able to take the lineout and eventually kicked the ball in to touch to claim the victory.

Next week sees Phoenix travel to Ripon, a ground where the home side are always strong, but where Phoenix have enjoyed last gasp wins for the past two seasons.