Treble from Henderson leads Park to victory

RHYS Henderson scored a hat-trick as Sedgley Park Tigers kept their promotion hopes alive by romping to a convincing bonus-point triumph against Stourbridge at Park Lane.

Five first-half tries put the hosts in firm control before they continued that dominance after the break, much to the joy of general manager Geoff Roberts.

“We were just super today, it was one of those days where just about everything came together for us,” said Roberts.

“It’s the closest we’ve come to a complete performance this season. The variety of tries we scored was simply superb with some out wide while others came through the brute force of our forwards.

“We need to maintain this now, and we will look to carry this on now to the end of the season. This has to be the standard.”

Park got off to the ideal start with Henderson scoring two tries in the first eight minutes.

The tries by the winger were almost identical, with the speedster zoomwind in twice from the first-phase ball following a scrum, with fly-half Steve Collins slotting both conversions.

The visitors hit back with an unconverted try from Jasper Smith against the run of play before the hosts took full control of the game with three unresponded tries before the break.

First, they hit back with a rolling maul try of their own before centre Oli Glasse cut through the line and committed the defender before passing to Andy Riley to score the bonus-point try, with Collins adding only the second of the two conversions.

Try-scoring machine Matthew Gallagher was next to get onto the scoresheet just before the break to make it 31-5 at half-time.

Henderson completed his hat-trick three minutes after the restart before Immanuel Feyi-Waboso crossed for the visitors.

However, Daniel Openshaw scored next for the hosts before Henderson zipped through to dot down his fourth.

Collins converted both tries to take his tally for the day to ten points.

Stourbridge Director of Rugby Neil Mitchell had nothing but praise for the hosts following the game.

“We’re certainly disappointed with the result, but make no mistake they were very good,” said Mitchell. “They were on the front foot from the very start and we struggled to deal with their clinical nature.

“We’ve got some good players in our squad, but compared to them we are struggling to get that continuity of the same 15 from one week to the next.”

Next up for Sedgley Park is another home match against second-bottom Huddersfield while Stourbridge will look to bounce back at home to third-bottom Blaydon.