By The Prof
November 28 2003

Well it was another loss away to Bath, at least the fact that we won the World Cup earlier in the day did something to reduce the disappointment of the result. It was a pretty poor game but there were one or two positives to take from the game, firstly we didn’t allow Bath’s dangerous backs to cross our try line, this also happened in our loss away to Leeds in the Powergen Cup, so our defence must be working well. Unfortunately the only way to defend against penalty kicks is to not give them away in kickable range in the first place!

Pat Sanderson scored the only try of the game with a very well worked set piece move straight off the training pitch. Vos moved to the front of the lineout, Fuga threw to him, Sanderson was running round to the front, caught the deflected ball from Vos and ran round to score – a great alternative to the rolling maul (a thing of beauty though it may be) from a 5m lineout. All in all the lineout and scrum performed well.

Paul Burke injured his ribs but there were no other injuries from Saturday. Ace Tiatia will be fully fit for the home game against Leeds this Saturday and will probably be on the bench, Harder should be back in a week or two. That will just leave Simon Miall on the injured list.

A couple of other people returning to The Stoop for training this week were Jason Leonard and Will Greenwood, two World Cup winners, can I just make sure everyone heard that – World Cup winners! To be honest the final wasn’t great, there were too many mistakes and too many penalties given away by England but we still won. Greenwood’s marshalling of the line and especially his defensive play was immense. Leonard obviously didn’t start the game but came on for Vickery for injury time, he calmed down the front row and stopped it getting penalised over and over again. Exactly what Andre Watson was seeing I have no idea, what I saw was England outscrummaging Australia over and over and over again.

The second team continued their unbeaten start to the season with a win over the Army at The Stoop. In atrocious conditions they managed to run in six tries (five of them converted by Adrian Jarvis) with no reply from the Army. Tries were scored by Kai Horstmann, Tom Williams (2), Tom Allen (2), and Karl Rudzki.

The U19s lost at home to Bath with Mark Lambert scoring the only Quins try. The U21s didn’t play.

This Saturday sees us having the chance to welcome back our World Cup winning duo of Will Greenwood and world record holding Jason Leonard – let’s make sure they remember their welcome and really raise the roof.

Come on you Quins!