Dunfermline S1s win at Stonehaven

Dunfermline S1s made the trip up to Stonehaven to play Mackie, with a barebones squad of 13, bereft of our usual front row players and fullback. However, this squad is an eager and flexible bunch, and we had Finlee and Brodie moving forward from their usual wing berths to play in the front row and no. 8 positions, with Gregor and Mack both moving forward a row in the pack. Matthew H also slotted seamlessly into the fullback position, and looked pretty comfortable there.
We opened the scoring early on, Gregor pouncing on a loose ball and running in from distance. Mackie almost equalised immediately through a lapse in defence from the restart, only stopped through some committed chasing and tackling from Duncan. We quickly regathered, working our way up the pitch, and a simple backs move was finished by a powerful run from Kian.
With the changes in the pack we were initially under pressure in the scrum, but we quickly sorted that out, Euan doing a great job at hooker to secure our ball, and Blair and Mack providing a bit of grunt behind him. From this point we controlled the rest of the half, were dominant at the breakdown, turned over the ball many times and scored a third try prior to the break.
In the second period, Mackie had clearly been given an inspiring team talk, as they came out much more aggressively. This, combined with some laziness in attack from ourselves – not keeping depth in our attacking line – meant that Mackie forced mistakes from us, got hold of the ball far more often, and scored a couple of good tries. But while Mackie enjoyed most of the play at this stage in the game, we were able to score at restarts from well executed handling moves by the backs, and thus matched their scores throughout this period. The half ended with Gregor repeating his efforts from the first try of the match, also kicking the conversion.
The third period saw us regain control of the match, Charlie again doing a great job at scrum half in controlling the game. Out wide, new-recruit Oskar looked more and more at ease, almost finishing a 50-yard run with a try, and showed composure in passing the ball out of trouble. On the other wing, Kailo put in one of his best displays, capped with a good tackle on his much bigger opposite number, and in the next phase of play he got himself on the end of some good attacking play with Brodie linking well with Kian, and Kailo outstripped two covering defenders to score in the corner. Mackie weren’t quite done, they battled hard and were rewarded with a fine solo try, but fittingly Dunfermline had the final word. From a scrum on Mackie’s 22, Andrew spotted space behind the Mackie defence and kicked through, and the chase through saw Duncan flip the ball back to Andrew, who ran in for the final try.