Harrogate - v- Selby U13's

Last Sunday saw Selby U13s travel to Harrogate’s new Rudding Park home.
The match started promisingly with Selby winning a scrum on the half-way line, playing the ball across the backs to Ollie Uren who ran half the length of the pitch to score a try. Things looked even brighter when Selby turned over a ruck from the re-start. Sam Perrin collected the ball out on the right wing and scored a try that was almost a carbon copy of the first. Harrogate then started to pick up their game and, with their big centre-half as the focus of their attack, broke through the Selby defence to score. From that point and for much of the rest of the game, Selby’s early promise faded. Missed tackles, loose passing and lateness at the rucks cost the away team another 3 tries before half-time. The first part of the second half carried on in a similar vein with Harrogate touching down twice more. Towards the end a re-focused Selby won a scrum against the head, the backs quickly moved the ball out wide and Ollie Uren used his blistering pace – on and off the ball - to out-run the Harrogate defence and score a try; which he duly converted. A couple of minutes later another passage of good Selby play saw Uren score his hat-trick. Harrogate touched down once more before the final whistle to seal their win.
The Selby coaches’ message following the game was quite straightforward: for about a quarter of the game Selby got the basics right – tackling, handling, rucking – and, in those short periods they out-played the opposition and scored tries. For most of the match, however, tackles were missed, passes misplaced or dropped and possession lost at rucks and breakdowns. There were many instances of good Selby play – particularly from Ollie Uren, Sam Perrin and Sam Chambers – but generally just too much inconsistency and loss of concentration. If Selby could take the sort of performance they showed in the early and late stages of this game and extend it across the whole period then they would be a match for most teams.