First of all I would like to give the reader two options for the match report. The first being a short, concise and expertly written piece by Mrs Cheffy.

They played in Pink, We played in Green.
HT 19 - 0 Irish
FT 24 – 11 Irish
We Won !! Wooohoooo

The second being a combined effort from myself and Canada after far too many bottles of Proseco before kick off. So for the disaster you are about to read I would like to apologise now!

Canada and I arrived in Treviso after a very civilised train journey from Venice where we had spent the evening in the delightful company of Waltham and his ladies, the Carlovians and Cooperman. His recommendation of the Barco Jazz was an inspired choice and we joined several London Irish supporters, who had already managed to convince some people they had already met to come to the game tomorrow. It went downhill from there very quickly.

We met the usual suspects in the infamous Hotel Continental the next morning and wandered quickly over to the café for the first beer of the morning. The bus stop to the ground was just outside of the front door of the Café so the Tinkerbelles in our new shirts headed to meet up with the growing group based just outside the ground. This is where we located the bottles of Proseco for 7 Euro.

The game kicked off several hours later and I did my normal trick of having left the paper and pen in the hotel room. So this report was written on the back of two Kleenex, which safely made it back to the UK.
I think it very necessary to mention the support that had travelled over at a rough guess, I would estimate there to have been over 500 people in green.
I don’t know what it sounded like on Sky but to be sat in the stadium itself we could have been playing this game at home in the Madstad. The only thing missing – The drums !

Treviso were not planning on making this easy for us and although we needed the win and bonus point to be sure of topping our group. They started off very aggressively and were putting us under pressure.

Richards really showed his quality as given attacking space he ran 40 metres giving us a boost of confidence to the players and the crowd.
Here is have in my very scratchy notes that the Treviso Prop ( 1) was sent off to the bin for 10 mins (can’t say what for though as I didn’t write that bit down and even if I had I don’t think I could have read it.)

Scrum to Irish and it’s taken quickly. There is a superb backhanded pass through the legs from Geezer to Richards, which he runs in and scores. Geraghty converts. 7- 0 to Irish.

The next piece of action saw a beautiful cross field kick from Geraghty with De Vedia catching and running to score a try. Hewitt converted making it 14 – 0 32 mins played.
There was a change for the front row as Faan swapped for Murphy.

Only minutes later Delon broke through Treviso tackles for an excellent pass to Hewitt who was speeding towards the try line. Hewats’ conversion bounced back off the uprights. 19-0 and I don’t think many of us could believe our eyes !

Richards put in a try preventing tackle as Treviso tried to put a score on the board before half time

The second half we made a lot harder for ourselves and Treviso kept the pressure on as soon as the game restarted. Even our line out which is the most commanding in the Guinness Premiership week in, week out came under attack.

Treviso had several penalties and slowly managed to chip away at our lead. However the boys held strong and the defence kept solid. Then something I have never seen before occurred, due to another Treviso prop being sent to the sin bin we were forced into uncontested scrums. Even though we had the man advantage we were unable to do anything with it and then Treviso scored in the corner. This made the score 19-11.

Whispers had started about the Perpignan score and I think it must have filtered back to the team as they made one last surge in injury time and Hewat powered over the line. At this the crowd erupted – We had out Bonus Point and the fact that the conversion was charged down didn’t really seem to matter.
We had got our home Quarter Final and the party had begun ( and finished almost 12 hours later) !