U15's v Aylesford

Sunday 5th October

The U15’s began their league campaign with a home game against Aylesford Bulls. Due to sickness, injury and the bad weather the teams started the game fairly evenly matched. Aylesford started the stronger of the two and although Basford defended well their forward domination resulted in a well worked try out wide -5-0 to Aylesford.
With new players having only recently joined the club it needed the Basford senior players to take control and aggressive defending from the Basford backline of Olivia, Layla, Yaz and Claire forced the Aylesford team into a number of unforeseen errors. On the next Basford attack a lovely waited pass by Olivia led to Abbie Graham scoring the team’s first points under the posts.
Aylesford demonstrated stubborn defiance and was determined not to allow the home team to take the upper hand but the Basford pack started to show a collective tenacity and not be overshadowed, making every breakdown a difficult area to win. Another Basford attacked led to Abbie Graham scoring her second try of the game, breaking through slack tackling by the Aylesford defence.
Aylesford again pushed forward in an attempt to reduce the deficient but Yaz cleverly read the opponents move to intercept a long pass running over half the pitch, with a chasing group, to score under the posts. Basford were now dominating play with Maddie, Amy, Abbie Cook, Layla and the rest of the team driving the opposition back on everyone of their attacks. A turnover ball was quickly passed wide which resulted in Olivia scoring a try under the posts. Abbie Graham again demonstrated her pace by scoring her 3rd try shortly after the restart.
Aylesford began to show signs of defeat and a 5 metre scrum, from a Basford player being held up over the line, produced a blind side move by Layla and a determined drive by Abbie Cook to score in the corner.
Abbie Graham scored her 4th try of the game from an Aylesford kick, running down the line past a desperate defence.
With only a few minutes left a wayward kick by Aylesford was penalised by Abbie Cook for the last try of the game. With 5 of the tries converted by Yaz the final score read 50-5 to Basford. A great win to the start of the season.
New girls Bon and Katie performed very well; especially as it was Bon’s first ever match after only 2-3 training sessions. The fire power of our backs is exceptional good this year with a mixture of experience and new players. The pack will grow in confidence after this game and I think any team will have a difficult time in trying to break them down.
One key player absent from the starting line up was our pack leader Lucy, who is greatly missed. Hopefully she will soon be back.

Report courtesy of Jeff Stembridge