It’s with a bare 15 players that Colts went to Ashbourne for a Friendly, low numbers due to unusually playing on a Saturday.
Although the weather was surprisingly mild the pitch was extremely muddy.

If the first 5 minutes of the game were all Stafford’s it’s the locals who opened the score with a penalty in front of the posts following what looked like a very harsh high tackle decision by the referee.
The following 25 min saw Stafford dominate territoriality but unfortunately incapable of scoring because of the very aggressive defence presented by our hosts. Eventually one of Ashbourne’s Centre managed to make a break following a turnover and a few phases later Ashbourne managed to score an unconverted try on our wing taking the score to 8-0 at Half Time.

Our prop Archie having to leave at Half Time we were prevented dropping to 14 players by the locals gifting us with one of their players.
The second half started very much like the first one did with Stafford having most of the possession
Following a line out won on their 40 meters line and a decent sequence of flowing Rugby with most of the backs touching the ball our left winger Misa delivered a perfect offload while being tackled to second row Lochlan Stewart who went over the try line and scored.
The conversion from almost the Touchline was very narrowly missed by Fly Half Seb Connaghan leaving the score at 8-5 with 25 min to Go in the second half.

Almost straight from the restart Ashbourne were granted a penalty in our 22 that their scrum half opted to play rapidly to score a try almost under the posts, giving them an easy conversion attempt that they did not miss.
15-5 with just under 25 min to go.
From there the rest of the game was almost all spent in our own 22 defending but credit to the lads they never allowed Ashbourne to score again and the game ended on that score. It was a very good performance with many forwards playing out of positions, 6 members of that pack usually playing in the front row.

Main negative point to the day was our winger Misa getting a knock to the head in what was the last tackle of the game and showing some signs of concussion afterwards so out of actions for at least 23 days under the Headcase protocol

Ollie