Bonus point away win sees Bridgford top the league

The much changed Bridgford 2nd XV started well getting the better of the territory as both teams looked to run strongly at their opposition defence. From one spell of Bridgford pressure around the Ilkeston 22 the ball was turned over and the resulting hurried clearance landed in midfield and bounced beautifully for the Ilkeston number 8 to gallop the 40m remaining to score under the posts.

This piece of bad luck seemed to galvanise the Bridgford side and after some nice play in midfield saw Darren Burley bursting through. As he was hauled down a meter short of the line an Ilkeston player came from an offside position to kick the ball away as the support was about to score. A penalty try was the inevitable result.

Not long after the 2nd try came it was the type of try that would grace any game and exactly how we try to play our rugby. The initial break made by Pepper then resulted in 6 or 7 phases of play both going forward and back before a gap round the fringes appeared for Burley to score from 5 yards out.

Bridgford continued to look the stronger with some excellent positional kicking by Cooke and Pawley not letting Ilkeston out of their half for any period of time. But one nice piece of play linking forwards and backs saw a full length of the field effort level the scores at 14-14 around the half hour mark.

Yet again Bridgford hit straight back with Browny scoring after some good approach play. Again this was converted by Cooke to send us into the half time break 21-14 infront.

The 2nd half didn’t start as planned with Ilkeston scoring in the corner after a well executed scrum move, although we were disappointed with how we defended it. The missed conversion made the score 21-19.

The next 30 mins saw plenty of action without any further scores, with both teams enjoying periods of dominance. Ilkeston did gain a man advantage for 10 mins when the always defensively robust Wagstaff had a slight ‘timing issue’ with one of his tackles and had a well deserved 10 minute rest!

The return to 15 a side saw the game finally swing towards Bridgford and after an excellent grubber kick from Burley pinned the home side on their own line, the resulting period of play saw the now dominant Bridgford pack push over their opposite numbers with Pike doing the important job of dotting down over the line.
As the game now was drawing to a close some more Bridgford pressure saw James Scott finishing nicely in the corner making the final score 31-19.

This was another team performance that shows the strength in depth the club has at the moment. As a back watching from the sides a big credit needs to be given to the pack with excellent set piece especially the line out and the work the front 5 put in at the breakdown securing clean ball giving the rest of the team time to play.