Plymouth 33 Birmingham & Solihull 10

An opening day defeat, a red card and injuries to three key players – whichever way you look at it, this was not a good start for the Bees. A trip to Brickfields on the opening day was always going to provide player-coach Russell Earnshaw with a test. But to lose influential hooker Ben Phillips and new signing PJ Gidlow inside the opening quarter further hindered an already tricky task.

Earnshaw said: “We lost Ben Phillips and PJ Gidlow early on and the had Mitch Culpin stretchered off in the second half. We don’t have a huge squad but we just have to get on with it.”

And to add to Earnshaw’s misery, Tal Selley and George Thomas picked up yellow cards while there was a red for replacement prop Darren O’Reilly when the front rows squared up.

“When the scrum went down Darren got kneed in the face and reacted,” Earnshaw said. “I will need to look at the video before deciding what to do.”

The fact that Plymouth scored all four of their tries while Bees were down to 14 will come as little consolation to the coach who will be keen for a better display against Bristol on Saturday.

“I’m obviously disappointed, especially as I know we didn’t play as well as we can. Plymouth played the way we were expecting them to but we made far too many basic errors.”

Bees matched their hosts early on and were inches away from taking the lead when a penalty from fly-half Mark Woodrow rebounded off an upright.

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