Last season (16 March 2002) the crowd was 6,525. Whoever sells season tickets, organises promotions etc… at the club ought to be very, very satisfied with themselves. Great work!

What else can we talk about? Having sampled the bars in both East and West, I can safely say all worries about speed of service seem to have been allayed. You can get nearly a pint of cr@p beer in no time at all. Only in England would we regard this as an improvement!

What’s that? The rugby? Well, it was OK I suppose. Nice to see us firing on four out of six cylinders instead sputtering away on the usual two. Your reporter was positioned on the Newcastle touch line by the Quin’s village or whatever that blow up play area is. Thus we were ideally positioned to see the first try.

Nice little kick by Slemen meant the Newcastle player catching it (sorry, didn’t get his name) juggled it so couldn’t go for the mark, passed it back under pressure, far too high for Mark Wilkinson who not surprisingly missed it, Sanderson was going like a steam engine at this point, and got a hand on it while it was in danger of going over the dead ball line. Slemen missed the conversion and I thought that was going to be a day of embarrassment for him.

"It's him, Ref!"  Duncombe is back ©kwin

What followed was to set the pattern for the afternoon, sustained pressure by Quins, Newcastle always on the back foot, forced to try and kick their way up field. We had a couple of half chances but in the next half hour Slemen and Wilkinson both got 2 penalties each. Slemen’s penalties were all of the sort Will Carling used to get.

It was 11-6 at the half hour, the ball came out from Newcastle to Johnny Wilkinson and he dropped it! Forward! You wouldn’t have been more surprised if you caught your maiden aunt doing the can-can! The next thing we knew there was this rolling maul , I thought Jase had the ball but basically he just had the rest of the team and then he seemed to heave all of them over, the refs arm went up and it wasn’t Jase but Gomez who came up with it. Slemen was square enough on to kick it over. A couple of minutes later an easy penalty and that was the story for half time. 21-6, they were never going to come back from that surely?

Sooooooo… my son Mark always likes to change round at half time. We couldn’t find any space on the rails the other end so decided on that great stand by the West Stand bar. It’s so good to watch the match from that height (please someone note this for the next West Stand design). Up there, we got to watch a fast asleep team let Johnny Wilkinson get his team straight back in the game two minutes after the start. A penalty, everyone slow to get in position, some poor tackling, and there it was. JW kicked the conversion from about 4 yards in and there it was. 21-13.

At this point someone in the bar shouted “Get your fingers out your @rse , Quins. Come on!”. There’s a quote you won’t see in the regular Sundays! It seemed to take forever but eventually they did just that. Tony Diprose came up from another great rolling maul with the ball in his hand. This was after whatisname of the Falcons had been yellow carded. Pulling down the maul. Was that a candidate for a penalty try or what? We were definitely going to score if that hadn’t happened, what more did the ref need? Slemen missed the conversion, would he have missed that if we’d had the penalty try?

Newcastle marginally offside. Amazingly the ref has noticed ©Binky

Wilkinson got a penalty after that and we were still wondering can we do it? 26-16.

The next score was Greenwood’s brilliant effort. We’d run it down the right side and got nowhere, gone left and ran out of space, then we came back right. I was shouting “Go wide!” so of course when Greenwood got it, he was facing, what?, three of them? He ran straight, jinked, rounded a couple of them, straightened and just went for it and there it was! Great, great try!

"Now stop that at once!"  A touch judge intervenes ©kwin

No-one could have missed it and Williams didn’t. Yes, Williams! The more amazing bit was the restart had barely began and we were back over the try line again. Duncombe skipped over the line and Williams stuck another one over. In the bar we were so happy we were arguing over whether it was four or five tries, completely ignoring it was a bonus point either way!

Just before the end Noon got a consolation try and of course JW kicked it but we knew it was too late. Then Tani skipped over at the last, Gollings converted and the end result was 47-23.

So, six tries us, two tries them. Three penalties us, three to them. Four conversions us, two to them – not bad eh?

At the press conference afterwards, Mark Evans was doing his best to be unimpressed.

“Only got 47, should have scored more”

“Not happy with the first half, or the second for that matter. Lots of opportunities… only two tries… butchered two 5 yard tries. Unlucky with the cross kick.”

“Lost control of the game 2nd half”. “Momentum gone”. “Good scrum, set pieces, restarts atrocious”. “Nick D good threat… Will G. not match fit… Back row playing well, all three”.

“happy with referee and sin bins, if you come in at the side like Ace you deserve all you get”

Rob Andrew was there much longer:

“Not acceptable. Wasn’t very good, disappointing, Falcons good at home, not good away (repeat ad nauseam)”

“We were affected by our injuries” (and Quins weren’t?)

On the Tiatia tackle and was it legal? “I don’t want to go all Arsene Wenger but I didn’t see it”. (must have been the only person in the ground, Rob!)

Asked if he’d offloaded too many people in the summer, Rob said “In the summer I was pretty comfortable the team was OK. If you have a bad week then you get hammered”

There was a lot of other stuff in the same vein but it boiled down to “home form good, away form bad”.

The question is what will Newcastle do when JW is away with England?

But I can’t leave it with Rob Andrew. That was encouraging because we know we weren’t great! That was second gear and we thumped Newcastle! Third gear and we’d give Tigers a run for their money. Fourth gear and we could beat anyone. Absolutely anyone. At last we’re shaking off that “under achievers” tag!

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