Blaydon 21 Coventry 16 by John Wilkinson

A clear wake-up call for Coventry as their winning start to National League One came to a shuddering halt against a Blaydon side full of Northern grit.

Cov have never won at Crow Trees, and from the first whistle they never looked like changing that against a home side that bullied and outmuscled them for the entire 80 minutes.

Whether or not they had paid too much attention to table positions before the game, Cov were unable to lift their level to the intensity shown by Blaydon who played like the team that finished third last season and certainly not like one that had lost its first four matches.

The hosts were totally dominant in the scrum, pushing Cov back with depressing regularity, but even without that platform, the visitors still had more than enough ball and territory to have won.

But until Louis Silver’s injury-time try, linking with Jacques Le Roux to break the length of the field with Blaydon committed to chasing a bonus-point score, Cov rarely looked capable of breaching a stubborn Blaydon defence which grew in stature along with the belief that they could win.

As Cov repeatedly struggled to get beyond the gain line, so the frustration seemed to creep in and the handling errors increased, and although they kept their effort going right to the end to salvage a point, they were flattered by the final scoreline.

On an afternoon that called for sleeves to be rolled up, Cov – with few exceptions – came up short against a team who wanted it more.

Cov should have been behind within a minute, winger Sean Brown slicing through their defence from the opening line-out on halfway only to spill the ball as he crossed the line.

But the scrum that followed set the tone, Cov knocking-on under pressure and giving the put-in to Blaydon who promptly worked a gap for Tom Jeffery to go through and score by the posts, Andrew Baggett converting.

Had James Otutaha’s scoring pass to Silver two minutes later not been judged forward, who knows what might have happened, but the try was ruled out and Cov had to wait until the 14th minute to open their account with a Cliffie Hodgson penalty moments after he had missed a first chance.

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