Euan Welsh reports from Hawick on this local derby in the second round of the National Shield competition.
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All Eyes turned to National Shield action for teams in the regional leagues and in the round of 32 there was a fierce border Derby between longam and hland Dean both of these sides have had a bit of a blonde League season so the exciting prospect of a cup run was
Mouthwatering for both clubs longum play in East League 1 which is a league higher than their lindian opponents but it was the man in blue who took the early points for on the bulk of possession and territory as o gr slotted two penalties for an early 6n lead this
Gave on the Wake Up Call that they needed and they soon had a dominant period at the other end the outcome of their attack was a converted try when standoff Bailey Donaldson reached out to touchdown with Nathan Smith converting another lindan penalty took them out to nine points before l once again went
Hard on attack and after a few phases of tight plays the ball was shipped wide where Smith was able to crash over for the second score lendine were very much still in the game but an error at the back was capitalized On by Jamie gley who grabbed a third try and Brilliant individual
Fashion the score was Rel for straightened from a lindine point of view but for Lam they gave them real confidence in control the last 5 minutes of the first half was Total Carnage for the lindine three separate yellow cards and a penalty try put them in an even worse
Position as two high tackles in a stamping incident saw them have to play with even bigger holes in their defense the penalty trials an automatic seven pointer given long with 28 points to n lead at the break into the second half the long attack did not slow down and
Colum Jeffrey was a nickn name on the score sheet as he crossed over for the fifth try after some clever running by Captain Smith and a while executed offload Smith then got his second of the afternoon with an unconverted try through more individual skill following a scrum and attacking position beting
The last Defender as the weather took a turn at the volunteer Park Hine will take pride in the way that they never give up throughout this game and they did manage to get a try through Dum Kiki which was converted to take them to 16 points longam also received the yellow
Card as Tom Hope was sent to the bin but didn’t make much of a difference as it was still time for more tries before the fulltime whistle Nathan Smith completed his heart trick with another nice bit of individual play following a Crossfield kick by Bailey Donaldson before Josh
Duffy rounded off the scoring with a try at the death which was Lam’s e8th of the afternoon and which was a one-sided game after the open in 20 minutes longum will now progress into the third round H lindan will have to regroup and take their learnings from playing a team from
The league above full time at the volunteer Park hland 16 lam 50 Nathan a big win in the shield you must be super happy with that yeah bu uh once we saw the draw and we realized it was going to be dun lindine I won’t lie we were
Hoping it was going to be H lindine um for years it’s been our biggest fixture so to have missed it this year would have been a bit of a bummer but to come up here these are the games you want to play in pack stand and beat your Rivals
Like that yeah class yeah it was sloppy to begin with we it’s just a lack of game time we’re not we’re not up to speed with how referees are wanting to to ref the game few easy penalties let them into our half and then the kick
Penalties and they build up a 9-0 lead but we spoke about just kind of leaving off in defense not going poaching for ball and and getting ball back in the tackle getting down there end and scoring it proved proved to work in the end um just managed to get ball up this
End and our hands and stuff are class like we’re into running rugby that’s what we’re about and uh once we get going with the backs and stuff it’s just d fall in a score line reflects the game for us to be to be honest can we were
Really good in phes first 10 minutes we were playing some amazing rugby took a 90 lead but can at the end of the day we done Silly mistakes we got silly yellows three players off the pitch at the same time on yellow cards there’s nothing
Much more you can do when you have a player like Billy Donaldson who can just find spaces as easy as that but can I can’t really fought the boys after we tried really hard there we’ve been looking forward to this game for a while obviously the score line doesn’t reflect
How well we played like but at the end of the day it is what it is
