By Workie Ticket (02/03/03)
March 3 2003

Three penalties and a drop goal all from the boot of Jonny Wilkinson earned the Falcons a losing bonus point in a scrappy encounter at Adams Park yesterday. They could have had the four points on offer if it wasn't for a mistake half way through the first half. Defeat by Wasps yesterday moved us straight back to the bottom of the league level on points with London Irish, who now have a game in hand. Bristol's 6 trys to Quins' 5 trys in today's game at Bristol moves Bristol up to 7th and Quins 2 bonus points puts them 8th, with Saracens dropping to 9th. There are only five points separating the bottom six teams, who now will be scrapping for the points required to guarantee ZP survival. It’s going to be a long Spring!

The Falcons failed to gel as they had in the previous games against Leeds and Quins. Team selection revolved around a late fitness test on Mark Andrews who had not fully recovered from the ankle injury picked up at Leeds. This resulted in Craig "Stretch" Hamilton (pictured) being returned to the starting line up and Warren Britz given his opportunity to start his first competitive game at open-side, partnering Epi and Hugh at 6 and 8 respectively. Epi was back to his worst with a woeful performance. He had just returned from Tonga after visiting his sick father and you have to question his selection for this game when you take this into consideration along with the very streetwise Wasps back row of Worsley, Volley and Dallaglio. The backs were as expected with Tom May and Garath Maclure on the bench.

This was always going to be a difficult game with Wasps looking to take advantage of Leicester and Leeds not playing in the ZP and their win moves them up 5th to 3rd place.

Most of the game took place between the two 22s with Wasps looking the most threatening in attack, through wingers John Rudd and Josh Lewsey, although both teams put all they could into stifling the other side.

The game was further hampered by the performance of the officials who must be the worst team, if that's what you can call them, I have seen this season. All credit to Messers Maybank, Barnes and Broadwell for a very poor performance. By the way, Mr Barnes was the referee who lost control of the Falcons v Cats game back in February.

The game got off to a relatively good start for the Falcons with Wasps giving away a penalty in the first minute for handling at a ruck. However, Jonny pulled the kick just wide of the right hand post. Within two more minutes Wasps were penalized again and Jonny found the target with a kick straight between the posts from just inside the Falcons half. The score was leveled a few minutes later when the Falcons were penalized for offside and Alex King took the resulting kick from inside the Falcons 22.

Halfway through the first half saw the incident which won the game for Wasps. An Alex King kick up field led to debutant Warren Britz trying to palm the ball back to Joe Shaw. Shaw either couldn't or, in my opinion, didn't want to take the ball on. This allowed Rudd to collect the ball and dive over for the try, which was converted by King.

Just after the half-hour, Jonny took another penalty to bring the score to 10-6. Shortly after this saw the Falcons best break of the afternoon when Jonny spun his way through the Wasps defence. He looked almost clean through, but probably thought he didn’t have the legs to get him to the line and the resulting pass out to Stevo wasn’t quite right and the ball was knocked on.

Jonny brought the score line up to 10-9 with a drop goal (how often does he score these for us?) in the last few seconds of first half stoppage time.

The second half was pretty much the same as the first with both teams managing to stop the other from making any real penetration. Stuart Abbott had 10 minutes in the bin for illegal use of the boot, which resulted in Jamie Noon receiving medical attention to his ankle. Alex King scored another penalty for Wasps, having missed an earlier drop goal attempt and a few minutes later Jonny replied with another penalty when Wasps were caught handling in the ruck again. This brought the game to the final score of 13-12.

Once again we competed well in the forwards and we definitely had the edge in the lineouts where Stretch proved himself yet again. However, we would have benefited from having a real back rower playing in this game. When Epi had the ball he tended to knock on or was stopped in his tracks by Wasps defence. In my opinion we cannot afford to have Epi start in the must win home game against Leicester two weeks today. The game plan, as usual, was give the ball to Epi. When he has a good day, as he did against Quins, it works very well, On Saturday he had an off day, the plan didn't work and there was no Plan B.

The backs failed, yet again, to match up to the forwards. The Wasps back three of Rudd, Lewsey and Van Gisbergen were by no means world class but there overall performance put our back three in the shade. Defensively we are doing OK, we just don't have anyone with that spark or flair who can spot the gap and make something out of nothing and this is where the management need to look long and hard.

The Teams

London Wasps

15 M Van Gisbergen, 14 J Lewsey, 13 F Waters, 12 S Abbott, 11 J Rudd, 10 A King, 9 R Howley, 1 C Dowd, 2 T Leota, 3 W Green, 4 S Shaw, 5 R Birkett, 6 J Worsley, 7 P Volley, 8 L Dallaglio (capt)

Replacements: K Logan for J Rudd (50), P Greening for T Leota (53), M Lock for P Volley (65), M Wood for R Howley (70), A McKenzie for W Green (79)

Blood bin: M Denney for S Abbott (13 - 19)
Yellow card: Abbott (51)

Newcastle Falcons

15 J Shaw, 14 L Botham, 13 J Noon, 12 M Mayerhofler, 11 M Stephenson, 10 J Wilkinson (capt), 9 J Grindal, 1 I Peel, 2 N Makin, 3 M Hurter, 4 C Hamilton, 5 S Grimes, 6 E Taione, W Britz, H Vyvyan

Replacements: G Maclure for J Shaw (54), M Ward for M Hurter (64), A Mower for W Britz (64), H Charlton for J Grindal (64).

Officials

Referee: R Maybank (London) Touch Judge: Wayne Barnes Touch Judge: Dave Broadwell

Scorers

Newcastle Falcons

Pens: Wilkinson (3)
DG: Wilkinson (1)

London Wasps

Try: Rudd
Con: King (1)
Pens: King (2)

Scoring sequence

0-3, 3-3, 10-3, 10-9 (half-time), 13-9, 13-12 (final score)

Attendance: 6199

---

The Falcons' next game is Sunday March 16 at home to Leicester Tigers, kick off 2.30pm, if you would like to report on, or preview the match then please let email: Mally (Site Editor) - tykefalcon@hotmail.com