By Whaley Shark
October 23 2010

Well, I’ve said before that I think our Premiership season will be defined by the six games against Leeds, Falcons and Exeter. So if that’s correct, our first priority must be not to lose any of those and, if that’s what we set out to do at Leeds last night, we succeeded. However, that success hasn’t left me very much to write about.

The first half ended 0-0, which probably says all you need to know about it. Leeds had loads of possession and no penetration. We had a very well organised defence, which generally doubled up on the Leeds players and suffocated their attacks. Both sides spilt the ball and conceded quite a few penalties, but Leeds’ Ceirion Thomas fired wide with the only realistic chance of scoring.

The deadlock was broken soon after half time, when Charlie put the restart straight out and, from the resulting scrum, Leeds made some ground and won a penalty 40 metres out, which Thomas kicked. The error-strewn, fragmented play continued until we got a decent maul rolling from a scrum and, in stopping us, Leeds gave Nick Macleod an easy penalty chance to equalise.

We finally got our noses in from just before the hour. Quates fielded a high kick and ran it back. Will Cliff made a neat break and got away from the defence, then a couple of quick offloads, first to Charlie, then to Carl Fearns, brought us close to the Leeds line. Under the pressure, Leeds gave us another penalty, which Nick Macleod kicked.

The only other memorable action was a long range penalty attempt from Nick Macleod, which had the length, but came back off the post. While the play opened up a bit in the last ten minutes as Leeds grew desperate, and we responded with some penetrating attacks, there were still too many errors, and no further scores.

Well, the game certainly wasn’t a classic. I think we primarily set out to defend, and our defence was indeed very organised and disciplined, and we were just able to nick a couple of penalties to take the match. The result pushes us up to mid table and keeps Leeds firmly rooted to the bottom. So the ends presumably justify the means…… Man of the Match, probably the Sale defence coach but, of the players on the pitch, Will Cliff for me. Oh and thank you to the Highways Agency who closed the motorway out of Leeds and seemed to feel that we’d cope through some form of psychic navigation (to find Manchester, follow signs for Hull and London).

PS Peregrine- good to meet you. Hope you enjoyed the pizza