Going into this match, at Droitwich RFC, it was expected whoever won would finish 2nd in the pool behind East Midlands who were playing Leicestershire. With our current playing record we expected to be the best runners-up and thus be in the semi-finals if we achieved a bonus try win. However the same could be said of Eastern Counties.
Within the first minute skipper Connor Nichols opened the scoring with a well worked flowing try close to the posts allowing Sam Vaughan to kick the conversion. 10 minutes later Will Harris sniped his way under the posts making the conversion easy for Vaughan. However, North Midlands’ failure to control the kick-off allowed Eastern Counties to take possession and score a converted try of their own.
The remainder of the half belonged to North Midlands with some excellent running and support work allowing Callum Megram and Drew Harper to score tries with Vaughan converting the latter. It should be said that it was not all our way as Eastern Counties mounted a number of flowing attacks but the defense held strong. Half-time score was 26 – 7 and everything looked good.
The second half started like the first with Adam Shaw (MoM) completing a passing move to score wideout. But again failure to control the restart saw Eastern Counties score an unconverted try. Harper scored his second and Vaughan converted, pushing the score out to 38 -12. The last 20 minutes with the match apparently won, North Mids seemed to relax allowing the visitors to take the upper hand and to finish with 2 converted tries making the final score 38 – 26.
We went into the Clubhouse only to find that Leicestershire had beaten East Midlands (15 – 10) making North Mids the Pool winners and East Mids as the runner-up and with the best record in Division 2.
We now await the opposition and location of the semi-final. Having had 2 away matches we are hoping for another home fixture.
