London Welsh v London Scottish Preview
By Mark W-J
November 17 2011
Phase One of the Championship season reaches its midway point this weekend with round eleven of the league stage. Recent results have seen the top eight clubs starting to break away from the four clubs currently occupying the four relegation play-off places, and a home win over our fellow Exiles on Saturday would see the Welsh holding a top-two position, in-line with the early-season objectives.
London Scottish were promoted to the Championship last season after an absence of thirteen years; they were promoted to the Premiership (then Allied Dunbar Premiership One) in 1998, the year we reclaimed our place in level two. The events of that season amongst the elite are well-documented, the subsequent demotion of nine leagues to Herts & Middlesex One - where the London Welsh Amateurs began life last season - a cruel punishment and a warning to those with ambitions and aspirations beyond their means. The club’s website makes little mention of the brief flirtation with professionalism; their Wikipedia page has no record of their league history prior to 1999. Yet the amateur club rose again, four promotions in as many seasons elevating them to the brink of the National Leagues in 2004; a further three promotions in the last five years have brought them back to the professional environment.
While our objective for the season is to win promotion, you feel that Scottish would be happy to consolidate at this level and - rather like Bedford and Rotherham - they’d prefer not to push themselves back into the Premiership arena. This perceived lack of ambition appears to be at odds with the Championship clubs’ wishes to be seen as ‘Premiership Two’; to demonstrate that the gulf between the top two levels of the game is closing year-by-year. Yet there are many who believe that the professional game is still in, if not its infancy, a development phase - sixteen years have passed since the late Vernon Pugh declared the game ‘open’, and only three top-flight clubs have ever declared a profit in that time. On the one hand the rich are getting richer, but on the other we aren’t seeing enough public interest and enough income at a domestic level to expand the professional game to level two. One or two clubs are pursuing the Hollywood dream of ‘If you build it, they will come’ but those who’ve tried and failed and only just survived to tell the tale are in no rush to repeat their past mistakes, and while I may doing Scottish a disservice here, you wouldn’t blame them for harbouring more modest ambitions of being ‘the best semi-professional club in the country’.
After ten rounds of fixtures, Scottish sit in 10th place in the table, level with Plymouth on 18 points but behind the Devon club by virtue of three wins to their rivals’ four. The seven defeats have, however, yielded four losing bonus points, more than any other team, and two try bonuses is as many as Leeds, Nottingham, Plymouth and Esher put together. Two of their three victories have come against the teams below them in the table - 37-21 v Moseley, and 32-17 v Esher - while their best result was the opening day win over Rotherham, 16-11. Their defeats at home to the Pirates (23-25) and at Plymouth (25-29) were both the result of conceding last-minute tries; Scottish have conceded more tries in the final quarter than everyone bar Bedford, and only Welsh and Rotherham have scored more in the last 20 minutes. Ed Jackson has now been joined at the top of the try-scoring charts by Pirates’ winger David Doherty who failed to impress during a brief spell on-loan at ODP from Wasps four years ago, while Scottish fly-half Dan Mugford, a summer signing from Cambridge, has the best individual haul with 24 points versus Moseley (two tries, a conversion and four penalties). With three wins from six at the Athletic Ground they have collected more points at home than the Welsh - although in mitigation we’ve won two and drawn one of just four home games to date. Only Esher (0 from 4 games) and - surprisingly -Bedford (8 from 4), have earned fewer points at home than our 12; yet the Blues have the best away haul (25 from 6), with the Dragons in second (21 from 6).
As Scottish have climbed back up the ranks the club has become home to many former London Welsh players who had been looking to drop down to enjoy their rugby with a lower level of physicality and commitment. Their current squad includes Tim Holgate, Aaron Liffchak, Adam Kwasnicki, Ben Thomas & Anthony Andrews, while others who made the short journey to the Athletic Ground in recent years include Gareth Swales, Matt Vines, Duncan Hayward, Rory Greenslade-Jones, Lee Cholewa, Owain Walbyoff, Andy Fahey, Steve Millard, Lorne Ward, Colm Hannon, Matt Baker, Dan Beard, Dave Ramsay, Matt Fitzgerald and the legendary Jonathan Pettermerides. Guy Armitage has recently been dual-registered with Scottish, despite having been originally announced as one of the London Irish players to be DR’d with us this season. To be fair, centre is one position where we have a fair amount of strength-in-depth with Whatling, Tonga’uiha, Mackey, Jewell and the versatile James Lewis: it has also been suggested by the LI fans that our squad is so strong that their loan and DR players are struggling to make an impact at ODP, hence the decision to re-register Guy at Scottish. He scored on his debut at Nottingham at the end of last month, becoming - I believe - the first player to represent all three Exiles clubs in league rugby.
Our clubs have already met once this season, Welsh scoring five converted tries in the 44-9 win at the RAG in a B&I cup tie in September. This will be the first league meeting since the 1989-90 season, when Scottish were promoted from Courage Three as unbeaten Champions, while our fate was sealed on the final day of the season when defeat at Wakefield’s College Grove saw the Yorkshiremen earn the second promotion spot and sent us spiralling towards oblivion. Well, that’s how it felt at the time - we eventually clawed our way back up to where we felt we belonged, and it’s great to welcome back old friends who have suffered even more extreme emotions in their journey up and down the leagues. Their tale should be a reminder of the dangers of flying too close to the sun, but at the moment we’re still enjoying the view as we try to edge ever higher.
Former LW Player Anthony Andrews in defence against Nottingham
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Kick off time changed to 2pm for this match!
Replacements: 16. Nathan Morris, 17. Marc George, 18. Mike Powell, 19. Ed Jackson, 20. Ben Stevenson, 21. Alex Davies, 22. Edd Thrower.
How did we manage to butcher so many chances , and why couldn't we work out how to complete a set scrum to the ref's satisfaction?
For all the evident talents of many individuals I don't see a team.
There were a few seats still available in the stand for those who peered hard enough, and I didn't hear people grumbling about there being no stand behind the posts facing the Pagoda end. It seems the excitement of a match outweighs the quality of the seating, though a better standard of play would have enhanced the experience further. Nobody can argue it wasn't close right up to the final whistle. If only we could sustain this level of gate through the winter where I fear drops back to 850.
The set pieces were dire, a lot of the positioning was dreadful (how many times did we see the backs drawn into rucks and forwards left covering the midfield?), handling poor, overlaps missed and so on.
Replacements at 60 minutes appeared to have been decided before the game and weren't a reaction to what had happened on the pitch. If Gordon Ross was concussed to the extent he couldn't remember a chunk of the game (as it says in the article on the main site) then why wasn't Alex Davies put on? He'd had a couple of good performances in recent weeks. The distribution through the half backs to the centres and wings was increasingly slow and didn't give them room to create much.
Seb Jewell was my MotM despite proving that I was wrong and we do have cover at 15 if Ed Thrower isn't playing! Hope that the sight of him on crutches at the end of the match was due to the physios being cautious and not a sign of a more serious injury.
And finally... my six year old and I were practicing throwing and catching a ball in the garden on Sunday morning - he could teach a few of the professionals a thing or two.
Positives: we won.
BACK TO BASICS....am also a basic level 2 coach, it doesn't take a genius, "rugby, a simple game"
So- Gordon ( and others) run those lateral lines deliberately on many occcasions. On other occasions ( often when we have fast ball ) his angle of attack is much straighter as the key opportunity then is fast passing down the line
Look at Stephen Jones, Jonny Wilkinson, Trin Duhc... all run sideways as well as forwards
Can you tell I was a forward ???
Of course we are all happy with the win, the big crowd, however from a rugby prospective, lets win with style, and not make it hard work for the spectators to watch.