U14s win comfortably at Marlow

11th November 2007

Marlow U14B 5 – 35 Maidenhead U14B
Maidenhead U14s’ strength in depth shone through on Sunday morning as their B team came away with a convincing win at local rivals Marlow. This was a great team performance, maintained despite rotating a large squad to give all players some time on the pitch.

Markus Olivier marked his return from a long injury lay-off with the opening try, as one backs move broke down on the Marlow 22, Josh Edney demonstrated the perfect “pick and go” to produce quick ball and the backs moved this smoothly down the line for Olivier to score. Iain Whiteford converted. Marlow came back strongly, but were met with resolute defence and Dhruv Surya emerged from one challenge on his own 22 to outpace all defenders and score under the posts (supported all the way by an overly optimistic Markus!). Iain once again converted.

The next score was the culmination of fantastic support play between forwards and backs, driving up the pitch and rounded off by Markus, with Iain taking the score to 0-21.

For all of about 2 minutes!

Tim “Sebastian Chabal” Cronbach received the kick off and took route one, straight through the chasing Marlow players and all the way to score under the posts, making life easy for Iain Whiteford to take the half time score to 0-28.

Marlow started brightly in the second half, scoring early on from a tap penalty, but Maids rallied and put together a solid performance in defence and attack, scoring once more following good handling in the backs leading to Iain Whiteford adding all 7 points to take the final score to 5-35. The margin would have been greater but for last gasp defence from Marlow stopping 3 scoring opportunities once Maids had got over their line.

A number of players showed their best for of the season (and some their best form for several seasons!) in a very encouraging display.

The squad:
Tyler Bello, Daniel Keir, Josh Edney, Mark Hines, Jason Bates, James Deeley, Tim Cronbach, Kaya Baxter, James Balmer, Iain Whiteford, Ben Scolari, Bryn Evans, Jacob Sanders, Steven Carn, Jonathan Perry, Shiv Khindria, Sam McCarthy, Markus Olivier, Niall Collins, Dhruv Surya, Gareth Orwin, George Thomas.

MARLOW U14A : 5 – 0 : MAIDENHEAD U14A
The other game proved to be an altogether less satisfactory one, from both a playing and a spectator’s perspective. Whilst full credit must be given to a much improved and clearly highly motivated Marlow side, who gained their first ever win over Maids, the match was marred by an extraordinarily one-sided penalty count against Maidenhead which made proceedings very disjointed and stopped the visitors building any momentum. Marlow scored early on from a forward drive from close range, but thereafter looked unlikely to score again bar one attack, repelled with great accomplishment by Lawrence McSwan, making his debut at full-back. Maids, meanwhile, were unable to secure much ball to work with, and appeared to transgress whenever they did launch an attack, so were never able to build a period of concerted pressure.

We will have to look hard at what went wrong, and look forward to a possible re-match later in the season.