A Few Good Days For Quins

By Prof
February 14 2006

All in all it was a pretty good few days for Harlequins with the lead at the top of ND1 stretching to 13 points with the 1stXV winning away at Doncaster and Cornish Pirates doing us a big favour by beating Bedford.

The win at Doncaster was the first ‘nilling’ of the opposition so far this season and the standard of play was pretty good considering the terrible conditions. It was one of Quins’ better performances where the team didn’t let up after securing the bonus point.

The A team joined the 1stXV in being top of their league with a four try win over a strong Bristol side away from home. This season really is different with so many wins on the road.

Our England representatives all won too with Jordan Turner-Hall helping the U19s beat Italy while Mike Brown, Mark Lambert and Chris Robshaw ensured a win for England U21 too.

Looking at the statistics from the weekend Quins scored more tries and more points than anyone else in the League and we are still top of the ‘fair play’ table, although Simon Miall’s binning has now meant that London Welsh and Sedgley Tigers are level with us on only six yellow cards.

Although Will Greenwood’s 100% kicking strike rate was no doubt mentioned a lot on the coach trip back from Doncaster, Adrian Jarvis’ kicking at Donny was also 100% with him getting a penalty and five out of five conversions. Overall he is just three places behind Andrew Mehrtens now with an overall success rate of 76.47% to Mehtrs’ 80.46%. AJ is even ahead of the New Zealander (or is he South African now?) when you look at conversion success rates: AJ 79.31%; AM 73.33%

Quins have the highest number of tries scored with 92, Bedford are next with 74 , Sedgley Tigers are bottom with only 31 scored. Quins have also leaked fewest tries with only 25 scored against us, although it’s higher than the one per game that the management were hoping for. Bedford again are in second place having conceded 38 tries and, perhaps not surprisingly, Newbury have conceded a massive 78 tries!

On the individual try scoring table Simon Keogh is joint first alongside Pirates’ Richard Welding with 12 tries, Ugo is in second place on 11 tries and Nick Easter is in joint third place on 10 with Scott Donald.

So all in all a pretty good few days for Quins.

Long may it continue.