Rossendale U14s 40 - 17 Bolton U14s

Rossendale U14s played host to Bolton at Marl Pits on Sunday morning, in unusually sunny & warm conditions, and what a game Dale played, to take victory with 6 tries.

Bolton arrived at Marl Pits with a large squad of around 25 players, giving themselves plenty of opportunity to exploit the rolling substitutions, but the 19-strong Dale squad had been training hard and looked to upset the visitors.

Bolton kicked off, with both the wind and the slope in their favour, but it was Dale that struck first. The kick-off rolled into touch and, from the resulting lineout, Rhys Tighe made a surging break into Bolton territory. The scrambled defence managed to bring his run to a halt, only to see the ball offloaded to James Willetts in support, who ran in the first try under the posts, duly converted by James Willetts.

Bolton, however, were not going to take that lying down, and levelled the score fairly soon afterwards with a nicely work play.

The following period of play became evenly balanced, but both teams making advances, but the opposition defences held strong. Bolton even tried a mass replacement of about half of the pack to intimidate the Dale forwards. Undaunted, it was Dale who broke the deadlock though, with a superb display of flowing rugby, with some quick hands moving the ball about, and eventually leading to James WIlletts breaking through to score his second, again converted by James WIlletts.

Bolton again came back to score a try on the stroke of half time, to end the half Rossendale 14 – 12 Bolton.

With the promise of the wind and slope behind them, Dale looked forward a strong showing in the second half, but Bolton hadn’t read the script. Almost immediately, they broke through the Rossendale defences to score an unconverted try.

After that though, the flood gates appeared to open, as Dale ran in 4 unanswered tries, the first of which came from debutant Tom Haigh who ran a lovely line to deceive the defence and cross the whitewash. The next came after a weaving run from Idrees Nazir, led to a pass to James WIlletts to score the first of three more tries. After adding 3 more conversions, Rossendale ended the game with a 40 – 17 victory.

Throughout the whole game, the spirit, effort, energy, commitment, aggression and most of all teamwork were evident from every single player, so it was difficult to choice to name Ben Ludlam as Man of the Match, for an inspired second half performance after a move to flanker.