Captain admits Marlow’s 88-0 rout of Thatcham wasn’t much of a contest

Marlow captain Ian Thomson admits his side were barely tested in Saturday’s 88-0 demolition of rock-bottom Thatcham and questioned afterwards whether the game should have been played.

The visitors produced a blistering display, running in 14 tries, with wing Dean Whiteley helping himself to four of them. The hosts competed reasonably well in the scrum and in the lineout but were dominated in almost every other facet of the game as Rory Greenslade-Jones’ men ran out convincing winners. The result guarantees his side will finish second this season, with Chinnor 3rds having wrapped up the title with their win at Bicester on Saturday. Greenslade-Jones and his players now must wait and see if second place will be good enough for promotion this season.

Alongside Whiteley’s four tries, Charlie Cotton and Tom Fulford both scored twice while there were also tries for Phil Hellmuth, Patrick Toone, Josh Richardson, Tomaso Morgan, Miles Noble and Will Stallwood-Philp,

Speaking this week, Thomson said: “I am proud of the lads but if I am honest, it wasn’t much of a contest.

“At the end of the game we were wondering, ‘has anyone really got anything out of this?’. “They put a team out that got thumped, we haven’t really been tested. It was Super Saturday as well, so we missed pretty much all of the games. Not to put a downer on things though – it was fun for the lads to go out there and express themselves and score a lot of tries.

Dean scored four, that was impressive, and he’s pretty much on track to finish top try scorer this year. In all fairness to Thatcham, they had a decent scrum and decent movement in the lineouts – if rugby was just those two elements, they would have been fine. The floodgates seemed to open after a competitive first five minutes. Weirdly, it seemed like they just didn’t want to tackle us. We ran some really good fast plays, a lot of back play, it was only like one or two phases, and we could go under the posts for a score. There was superb rugby on show.”

Marlow round off their season at home to Bicester on Saturday.