Sale Sharks 14 Newcastle Falcons 15

Dan Braid touches down
By Whaley Shark
September 14 2013

 I suppose, a month ago, I’d have felt that 5 points from Gloucester away and Falcons at home was a reasonable return. I’d never, in a million years, have predicted we’d get those points in the way we have, though, and I guess that’s the frustration- we’d done the hard part, then cocked up the easy bit. 

I gave my notebook an outing last night but, frankly, the match was so disappointing I don’t fancy doing a blow-by-blow account. We did start pretty well, and spent most of the first 15 minutes in the Falcons’ half, but the only return was a penalty after seven minutes. Falcons then came into the match more, tying the scores, before we had another good spell, winning a second penalty as the prelude to the principal excitement of the evening. Under pressure, the Newcastle 6, Barrow, pulled down a maul and was sent to reflect on his sins for ten minutes. We kicked the penalty for touch, won the ball, and Dan Braid darted down the narrow side to touch down in the right corner. Newcastle fought on though, and picked up two further penalties to go in at half time 11-9 down.

The second half seemed to be a battle between a suffocating Falcons’ defence and a rather blunt Sale attack. We were leaking penalties quite regularly at scrum time and, at 48 minutes, a fourth successful kick gave Falcons the lead for the first time in the game. Even though we built a couple of good attacking positions, we couldn’t quite see the ball over the line and our only reward was a further penalty just on the hour, which Falcons answered on 68 minutes with what turned out to be the winning score. As the game drew to a close, we were trying to build attacks from within our own half, but really weren’t successful- the last plays of the game illustrate the problem. We started with a lineout on half way, ran through eight or nine phases, and ended up with the Falcons' defenders bundling one of our players into touch 20 metres into our own half to close their win out.

We had no real answer to an aggressive, gang-tackling Falcons defence- there should have been gaps somewhere, but we could find and exploit them. For whatever reason, the scrum seemed to misfire this week and leaking penalties in the AP is always going to be costly. Finally, Nick Macleod had a bit of an off night and left eight points on the pitch, with an early penalty coming back off the post, another going astray, and a missed, admittedly difficult, conversion.  All a bit ‘So near and yet so far’, really. Probably the most satisfactory part of the evening was trying a new cake recipe (cherry streusel if you're interested), which my neighbours felt worked pretty well.