Banbridge Rugby Club - Northern Ireland

In challenging cold wet conditions the match started brightly with Malone working hard at the breakdown and always looking to move the ball to their large mobile wings. Bann seemed a little out of their depth at first; the backs failed to come up in a flat line and tackling was poor.

Malone were first on the scorecard with a well worked try distributing the ball to the wings. They worked diligently through the whole half, sometimes spreading the ball wide, sometimes taking it through the centres, exploiting excellent handling skills that defied the weather conditions and using nicely weighted chip kicks to open up space behind the Bann defence.

Bann showed inconsistent defending and didn't always play to the whistle in a match where plenty of advantage was being offered by the referee. Jamie Mullen's support play was excellent, but too often other support failed to arriveand by the interval Malone had scored 29 points without reply.

At half time Malone changed their loan players to Bann and coach Mick gave the team a rousing talk, asking them to pretend that the score was nil-all and to play to the last minute.

It was clear that the talk had been taken to heart after the restart as Bann defended against continual Malone attacks on their line and with ten minutes played in the second half there had been no further scoring. Alexander Brown made some great tackles during this hectic period of defence.

This fired Bann's confidence and a sweeping breakout saw them move the length of the field only to have Jack Myles' try attempt denied due to being held up.. No birthday boy luck for him that time! However confidence had been restored and Bann soon got on the score card with a well-worked try. More was to come from the re-start as the Bann team doggedly chased and played to the whistle, thereby exploiting an advantage to send Charlie Wright away for another try.

For the next few minutes it was one-way traffic, with Charlie Jones, Charlie Wright (3), Daniel McBurney and Jack Myles crossing for tries. Whether Malone eased off due to over-confidence or Bann just committed more to playing to the last minute can be argued, but the fact remains that the final Bann try at full time was also the first time they were ahead on the scoreboard. Both Charlie Wright and Jamie Mullen scored with conversions.

There are important lessons for both teams around playing full advantage and playing the full 60 minutes in the run in to the Cup.

Many thanks to the positive Malone team and coaching staff and especially the six Malone players who played in such a committed manner whilst subbing on the Banbridge side.