We knew from the offset this game would be a development match as ABW couldn’t field a team of at least 13. This left our squad sharing players to ensure the fixture could be fulfilled. Before and after the game the ABW coaching staff were very appreciative of our team facilitating this. As coaches we were pleased to see many of our players willingly putting their hand up to fulfil this role.

For development we would focus on our own performance and the parts of our game we have been trying to improve through our recent training sessions. This proved difficult due to the ad hoc team set-ups. But in essence we were aiming to use impact runners to set-up controlled phase play, which generates more space in the field for our attack.

Unfortunately, despite the team buying into this it didn’t materialise on the pitch very often. When it did it was clear it added to our play and we scored well worked tries off the back of it.

As the scoreboard mounted up to get the further development out of the game we focussed on making one more pass to avoid contact and use our whole team. We also set-up the game as 12 v 13 in favour of ABW. This stressed our defence with the team finding themselves on the receiving end of more tries. They adapted to this with a quicker defensive press and came out of the last 20mins on top of this mini-game.

Overall a satisfying away win of 41-80 but not much learnt from the experience.