On a day when everyone was in grand slam fever mood and the nation focussed on events taking place in Cardiff, Wanderers had a curtain raiser against UCC. Of course this was a replay of a match in January when the referee amazingly abandoned the match with 7 minutes remaining and the score standing at 8-7 in favour of UCC. Many people would have been happy with the score too have stood, as it would have secured us another losing bonus point against the side that stand top of Division 2. In the end the result proved to be the same as the first outing with Wanderers securing another losing bonus point, amazingly our seventh of the season.
The match itself was a thrilling game and quite possibly our best performance of the season. It was a very close affair and the two aspects that were the most encouraging of the season were our discipline and our never say die attitude. As to the game itself wanderers took the lead through James Ritchie to go 3-0 up. The kicking performance by James has improved vastly over the last couple of weeks and this is undoubtedly down to the contribution of Ian Burns who has given up his valuable time to help with this aspect. Wanderers defensive effort was up to its high standards however as we came close to the end of the first half we were beginning to fall off a few first time tackles and this allowed UCC to gather momentum which resulted in a well earned try just on the stroke of half time. A bad time to concede a try which was converted to leave the score 7-3 at halftime.
The second half started in earnest and to be fair to UCC the momentum was with them at this stage and their pressure led to two penalties which they converted with another James Ritchie kick slotted in there to leave the score 13-6. At this stage it looked like it was going to be another losing bonus point defeat. Our lineout had been miss-firing throughout the second half which made it difficult for us to get any good primary possession to work off. However this began to change and after some brilliant lead in play we scored in the right hand corner to make the score 13-11 UCC. The conversion was off target however we now had the momentum. UCC put he ball in behind us and after one or two failed attempts to tidy the ball Thomas Hontebeyrie was deemed to have illegally taken a UCC player out and the referee awarded a penalty try to UCC with 3 minutes left in the game. This was converted and now the score was 20-11 in favour of UCC and after playing so well my thoughts were that we were going to get nothing out of this game.
However there would be another twist in this game, and the players showed an attitude and a mental toughness in the last 2 minutes to salvage something out of this game. The restart was gathered by Eoghan Nihill, and we held onto the ball for next 2 minutes which culminated in John Gibson touching down with the final play of the game. 20-16 to UCC and another point. Next week is where we will separate the men from the boys, and with Thomond lying one position below us in the table this game will be massive for both teams as it will surely determine one side’s faith.
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Wanderers v U.C.C.