Pats roll out big guns
MAYFIELD’S NWML side were beaten against an experienced St Pats side on Saturday – but emerged from the contest with pride very much intact.
Even though Mayfield’s NCL side had no game, coaches Craig White and Neil Ramsden resisted the temptation to load their side with first team players.
Their regular squad has been magnificent this season and had already handed out a comprehensive beating to the Pats outft.
Pats had other ideas though, stacking the team with NCL Premier Division players.
Mayfield started strongly with Joe Muir and Mark Biggins putting in crunching tackles. This rocked Pats but they soon regrouped and their experience began to tell against a Mayfield side with five U18s in their ranks.
Despite being outclassed, the Mayfield outfit gave a great account of themselves and never took a backward step even coming out on top in stages of the game.
Pats out-enthused the young visitors and with pacy halfbacks soon controlled the game, running in 14 unanswered points in the first half.
The game had to be moved to a fresh pitch at half time following a neck injury to a Pats player and the smaller pitch seemed to give Mayfield fresh hope of containing the home side. But they ran in three more tries to make the score 30-0.
Mayfield never gave up and in fact had the final say as Luke Hartley went over in the corner after a neat off load from Nick Hargreaves to make it 30-4.
This was the final action of the game, as far as rugby was concerned, after the referee brought an early end to the game following a free for all.
Mayfield took some pride from the game knowing it would have been a different story had they taken a leaf from Pats book and used all the players available to them.
But were still happy they had taken the decision to stick with their squad which has served them so well this campaign.