Well at least the sun shone!

1st Tykes Try
By Mally (on 29/09/02)
September 30 2002

Where to begin? We lost, Falcons finally remembered how to run, pass & catch, and the Tykes had the their worst game of the season so far, oh and yes the sun shone… So am I depressed? Well no, I’m not. Disappointed? Yes. Depressed? No.

Disappointed with “only” a bonus point! Thinking back to last season, I would have been deliriously happy to come away from Kingston Park with a lose bonus.

As was pointed out on the day, it is a sign of the Tykes progress that we’re so down about the result. We’ve come to expect more, we know the lads are capable of playing far better, they proved that on day one of the season.

So what went wrong this time?

Firstly the opposition had their best game so far this season. I knew the Falcons would come good sooner or later, but had hoped it would be later.

Looking at the Falcons’ team sheet Rob Andrew had shuffled his backs around, Jonny Wilkinson at 12, Tom May at 10, Liam Botham back on the wing with Joe Shaw, and at 15 Wilko’s older brother Mark getting his first Premiership start. The shuffling worked, Liam Botham won praise from many fans many of whom would have voted the man they nicknamed “Sloth” their Man of the Match. That honour however went instead to Jamie Noon, who has been the one Falcons back who has been on form all season. This time he benefited from his revitalised team mates, scoring the Falcons’ third try off a weaving run by Jonny Wilkinson.

Hall Charlton looked comfortable at scrum-half and for the first time this season I didn’t hear a single Falcons fan bemoaning the loss of Gary Armstrong. Charlton scored the Falcons first try, with a quick 35 metre run off the base of a ruck leaving the Tykes defence stranded.

However it wasn’t just the Falcons’ backs who had a good day try number two came courtesy of Stuart Grimes with the Scotland international touched down for his second try of the season.

Bad day at the office

Secondly and more importantly the Tykes didn’t look like the team we’ve had the pleasure of watching recently.

Our lineout was diabolical, dire, dreadful, I’m sure you get the picture, as Oopnorth said on the MB it was “out was back to its worst of last year and the killer try came from a lost own line out near half way”.

And it was not just the lineout, as Loosehead remarked:

“We never performed the basics well, the most basic of things - passing tackling etc, we concentrated too much on balls to the middle and back of the lineout and lost them. When we did throw short we did win a few of them. Our Scrum was solid, our passing was little wayward remember in the first half when Diego could have been in, but the ball was passed behind him. We got pulled too many times for crossing too many basic errors.”

So not our greatest performance but it was still a game we could have won, though had we done so we would have probably not deserved it. Falcons did out play us. One thing, which did detract from the result, and left a somewhat sour taste in the mouth, was the referee’s performance.

The referee

As one Falcon’s fan has pointed out to me the result does taint your perspective but I have to say I was not impressed. May be my fellow Tykes fans & I need to go back and re-read the rulebook, but there were several decisions, which looked to us to be decidedly iffy. The disallowed drop goal for one. We were convinced it had gone through, as apparently were the team (see the YEP report by Dave Craven). We got pulled up for crossing when the two players in question were running side by side, obstructing the tackle possibly, but not crossing. At one point Mr Pearson the referee, managed to block George Harder. He got completely in his way and this was when Tykes were pushing for a try, some 5 or 10 metres form the line!

It will be interesting to see the video, obviously as Tykes’ fans we were slightly biased and you can not see everything from the sidelines, but there were some very doubtful decisions made.

All things considered even if the refereeing had been perfect, I think we still would have lost. We didn’t look anywhere near as good as we were last week, let alone look as good as we were against Leicester.

Some positives

There were some positives to be had. We played badly but still scored two tries and came away with a bonus point. The second try was a cracker set up by our Dynamo Diego, which Scabs finished off for his fifth try of the season. The first came from a lovely cross field kick by Gordon Ross, which much to the delight of the Tykes fans George Harder collected to get his first Tykes try!

15 points from 5 matches, still respectable, and it’s far too soon to panic. From talking to some of the team after the game it was obvious that they were not happy with the way they’d played. A bounce back against Bristol seems very likely!

Yorkshire Evening Post