Wolves just the stronger on the day

On a perfect day for rugby , Staffordshire’s top side came to Sutton Coldfield to test the value of the home side’s recent successful record and the young green army certainly knew that they had been in a game.

The early exchanges were shared evenly but, when the young greens lost Tom Edge to the sin bin, they were unable to continue to defend their line against the visitors’ numerical forward superiority and soon found themselves five nil behind. A well struck Parisi penalty kept the locals in touch until the visitors finished the half with a superbly executed catch and drive from a close range lineout, which was well converted from close to the touchline. Sutton however, refused to buckle and a cleverly won ball in the opposition 22 was nicely swung to the right and Joe Zaric, with an overlapping winger in close proximity, cruised across the line to close the gap to 8-12 at half time.

The second half started well for the home side and a loose Wolverhampton clearance kick was pounced upon by the Sutton back three and swift, effective handling from Gregory and Chitnis released Myles Bean for his now customary 50 metre breeze around the cover defence for a spectacular try which was converted by Parisi. Shortly thereafter, with the visitors having failed to recognise the threat, Sutton again worked the ball to Bean in space and after he had again outpaced the defence he had the presence of mind to feed the ball back inside to Chitnis who had supported diligently from full back to walk in another well worked try, which was again converted by Parisi. At this point the home side were in control of the game, but the quality of the opposition was about to become apparent. A badly managed kick-off reception by Sutton gave the visitors good field position and they weren’t going to leave the danger zone until they had secured a try which was excellently converted from close to the touchline – game on at 22-19!

As the match progressed into the final quarter the visitors proved marginally stronger, especially as Sutton made a number of changes to ensure that their large squad was fully utilised, and they were able to produce two further unconverted tries, neither of which will make Sutton’s defence coaches overly happy, to take them into a 29-22 lead. Despite some late pressure from the homesters, some imprecise decision making in the scoring zone, coupled with some further handling errors in key positions – which had been a recurrent theme throughout the match – allowed the game to draw to a hard fought but disappointing loss for the greens. Importantly however, the players and coaches learned a lot more about the progression of this side in this narrow loss than they have done in some of the more comfortable victories achieved earlier in the season.