Bears back to winning ways after slaying Knights

BOROUGHMUIR BEARS returned to winning ways in the fourth round of the Super6 Championship with a 40-28 home win over Southern Knights, which was more convincing than the score-line suggests.

The Meggetland men lost heavily away to Ayrshire Bulls last week but quickly put that disappointment to the back of their minds when racing to a four-try bonus point by the 46th minute of this game, with Jack Fisher, Calum Ramm, Scott Robeson and Joe Jenkins all dotting down.

But they then let their opponents back into it, and Knights took full advantage with four tries in the last half hour from Alan Ferrie, Donald Crawford, Fraser Renwick and Finn Douglas ensuring that the Borderers headed back down the A7 to Melrose with a bonus-point to show for all their efforts.

Two late tries from Corey Tait and Jerry Blyth-Lafferty, and five successful conversions from Jack Bergin, meant that the final outcome was never really in doubt – but Bears head coach Graham Shiel wasn’t overly impressed.

“Making changes is a challenge for us in terms of the squad situation we have and the depths we are having to go to,” he said. “So, we lost our shape and our discipline later in the game, and to concede so many points is disappointing, but we can’t be overly disheartened with three wins out of four.”

Opposite number Bruce Ruthven added: “In that last 20 minutes we played some really good rugby.

“The shape was good, we got chances and we took them. We talked about being accurate all week, unfortunately if you are only accurate for 20 out of the 80 minutes we are going to get beat no matter who we are playing.”

In the later Super6 game yesterday afternoon, Heriot’s ran out 47-12 winners against a depleted Stirling Wolves outfit.

“I thought the first 20 minutes were great,” said Heriot’s co-coach Fin Gillies. “We did everything we said we wanted to do during the week, got two early tries and took our chances. The middle 40 minutes, though, were very frustrating and we could have scored a lot more tries.”