Rugby: Wimbledon suffer 31-45 defeat at home to Bury St Edmunds
Wimbledon 31 – Bury St Edmunds 45
This match started in a familiar manner, after five minutes and with Wimbledon defending, giving a senseless piece of foul play resulting in a yellow card for left-wing George Brosch and a penalty try for Bury after a consultation between the referee and his assistant.
Happily, the winger later made amends with two spectacular tries in the 62nd and 72nd minutes, the second one by a leaping inch-perfect catch of a crosskick from Edward Morgan.
But the visitors from Suffolk had arrived with a well-coached youthful team full of fitness and ambition and they duly delivered scoring seven tries and conceding five by Wimbledon.
It was end-to-end stuff for the whole match with both teams finding defence harder than attack.
Wimbledon’s poor discipline forced them to play the final period from 64 minutes onwards with fourteen players after a head-on-head contact by a Wimbledon player leading to a red card and for with a second yellow card in the 56th minute, this time by centre Paul Hendrie.
Centre Jack Reville cut through a gap on 16 minutes for Wimbledon’s first and Edward Morgan was successful with three of his five conversions.
Both teams had possible groundings denied and both teams suffered at times from ‘white line fever’ with good goal-line defence winning over the attackers, over on his wing Tomasz Pozniak added to his try tally on 29 and 36 minutes.
Bury also had a very reliable kicker in their outside half Ben Penfold who converted four out of six conversions.
At half time with the score at 19 –19, it seemed possible that Wimbledon’s larger pack could take control of this match, but with a solid scrum, Bury’s lineout was superior and won possession more than once when Wimbledon kicked penalties to the corner.
At this break in the fixtures, Wimbledon are in eleventh place in the league but with try bonus points earned from six of their seven fixtures played, they are very entertaining to watch but just need to keep fifteen players on the pitch for the whole match.
The league takes a break now until November 4 when Wimbledon travel to Henley Hawks kick-off at 3pm.
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