Lancaster 60 – 5 Chester
Despite it being a miserable Wednesday evening, Lancaster Men’s Rugby Union seconds thrashed the Chester first team in an early round cup tie.
Following kick-off and an early ruck, the ball spilled to Lancaster’s right winger, Matt Barrett, who fired off his first of many incredible runs, which resulted in a five-metre scrum that was cleared by Chester.
Despite Lancaster’s promising start, Chester came into a surprising attack in the seventh minute and scored the first try of the match. They missed their conversion leaving the opening score at 5-0.
Lancaster responded just four minutes later through Chris Wickington who powered through Chester’s back row to go over the try line and brought the scores level at 5-5 as the following conversion was narrowly missed.
Chester re-started the game only to be intercepted with Barret firing again down the left wing eventually leading to another scrum. The away side were completely overpowered by Lancaster as the ball spilled out once again to Wickington who scored his second try of the game in the 16th minute. The score increased to 12-5 as Lancaster’s fly-half Harry Roe scored his conversion.
The game swung very much one way from this point onwards as Lancaster dominated almost all following scrums and within 20 minutes Lancaster had converted a lineout straight into another try; again Roe scored his conversion to bring the score to 19-5.
Minutes later another line-out led to a maul deep in Chester’s half being spilled to captain Nick Farr who successfully made it over the line increasing the score to 24-5.
Towards the last 10 minutes of the first half Lancaster began to dominate all possession and in the 34th minute they scored another try through Matt Wilson and with another Roe conversion it meant that the score was left at 31-5 in the first half.
Lancaster kicked off the second half and continued their domination with Rob Field scoring another try after a lineout. Roe converted again to see the score stand at 38-5 by the 50th minute.
Moments later Field sparked another Lancaster attack and managed to get a pass through to Wickington who then completed an impressive hat-trick as the score grew to 43-5.
Substitute Liam Power, who came on for Lancaster in the second half of the game, demonstrated great hunger as he broke an attack down both wings in quick succession. Unfortunately he was clamped down metres from scoring. Nevertheless, full back Nick Halstead drove the ball over the line several minutes later on the hour mark.
From here onwards, Lancaster, as if not so already, began to make the game look fairly easy as inside centre Ollie Simmons received a quick pass that cut the right flank wide open and scored raising the score to 53-5.
The game looked pretty bleak for Chester at this point as no real threat was evident. Lancaster took advantage and continued to attack with Barrett still firing down the right side constantly leaving Chester’s players flat footed. His hard work eventually paid off as he ran straight through to score a try on the 72nd minute of the game. Roe converted his final kick of the match to bring the final score to 60-5.
Captain Nick Farr summed up the match by saying, “It was a cracking team performance where everyone got involved and stepped up to the plate.”
The cup fixtures ahead look extremely promising for the Lancaster side who demonstrated an inspiring team engine as well as several striking individual achievements in this game.
