London Welsh v Nottingham Play-Off Preview
By Mark W-J
March 8 2012
The Championship play-offs produce little in the way of variety, with Welsh and Nottingham being paired together for the third consecutive season - as indeed are Bedford and the Pirates. By the end of April we’ll have played the Green & Whites twelve times in three seasons, Bristol on eleven occasions and Doncaster ten, with the possibility of facing one of them over two legs in the final in May.
While Bristol, Bedford, Pirates and Welsh established themselves as the top four clubs back in the autumn, all having topped the table during the regular season, Nottingham have been firmly a mid-table side, spending a solitary week in fourth place following their 26-10 win over the Welsh at Meadow Lane in December. They won twelve and drew two of their 22 fixtures, but their results show remarkable consistency with regard to their success against teams in the top and bottom half of the table. They recorded home-and-away wins against the bottom five clubs, and were only beaten at home by the top two, recording wins over Welsh and Leeds and draws against Rotherham and Pirates to finish in fifth place on 62 points, two ahead of Leeds but three adrift of Welsh. The two teams met on the opening weekend of last season’s play-offs, the Exiles winning 48-26 in the first game ever to be televised live on Sky Sports from ODP, and we also won the return on the final weekend, 27-10, in what was effectively a dead rubber. In the inaugural Championship season we played each other back-to-back, home-and-away, in rounds three and four, Nottingham comprehensively outclassing the Welsh in a 29-10 win which was more one-sided than the scoreline suggests, before we gained our revenge, 17-10, eight days later. Yet on both previous occasions Welsh have progressed to the semi-finals as group runners-up, with Nottingham finishing third in the pool.
Saturday’s game will be the 31st meeting, with Welsh currently leading the series 16-14. Although the Green & Whites were formed in 1877, eight years before us, the first meeting wasn’t until our centenary season, and the now infamous cup semi-final at Beeston which we won 12-10 thanks to nine misses from ten attempts by Rob Andrew. The first of our 22 league meetings was on 27th September 1997 in level three of the pyramid - then called Jewson National League One - and our 40-14 victory, with tries from James Reynolds, Michael Dawes, Craig Raymond and Darren Edwards, remains our biggest winning margin over Nottingham in all competitions. In the three years of the Championship, Welsh have won six of the 10 games to-date, although half of those ten fixtures have resulted in away wins.
With 599 points and 65 tries scored, Nottingham have the fourth-best attacking record in the Championship, with Welsh fifth on both measures. Our visitors also have two of the division’s top marksmen in their ranks, with former Plymouth outside-half Keiran Hallett having amassed 189 points in 16 appearances and Japan international James Arlidge adding a further 157 in his 14 appearances since returning from the World Cup. Top try-scorer is full-back Dave Jackson with eight in just nine matches after he bagged a brace at Bedford on the final weekend of the regular season having returned the previous week after four months out with a fractured shoulder. Jackson and club captain Craig Hammond share the record for most appearances for the club, both running out for the 260th time in that game at Goldington Road last month.
A recent poll on Dragons’ Den suggests that we expect London Welsh to finish as runners-up again this year, only to fall once more at the semi-final stage. But Cornish Pirates coach, Harvey Biljon - who made six appearances, including four starts, for Welsh on-loan from Wasps in 2003-04 - hinted in a BBC interview last week that Nottingham could be the dark horse in the promotion play-offs. Despite the article’s opening paragraph stating that ‘Biljon says Nottingham could be the biggest threat to his team winning the play-offs’ he merely suggested that ‘There’s something going on there that we need to be aware of’, with respect to the new ownership and well-documented changes to their management structure which mean that, while their on-field fortunes this term have been solid rather than spectacular, they now have a firm foundation off-field on which to build for the future. And that future starts here - in the words of our own club’s website: now it starts to get serious.
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I wrote the following after the December match:
"There are matches you kick yourself for missing, matches you remember for 20 years, but there are also matches best forgotten. This was one of the latter really, Welsh and Nottingham both seems evenly matched at first but one by one the latter piled up penalty points (and a drop goal), whereas we didn't. Are we really off-side more often than other sides, or whatever? We seemed out-pushed or out-played in the scrum frequently, and got blamed for one swivelled scrum at least when to me the other side was responsible. We got beaten in the line-out by some simple tapping down of the ball. I couldn't really tell who was directing play, which may mean the half-back combination is not working in harmony with the back row. All in all, a scrappy match, scrappier than the scoreline suggests (after all they only scored one try).
For me the man of the match was Billy Moss for two electrifying straightline charges - in the first half he made a couple of dozen yards only for the pass he made to fall into a melee of supporting players none of whom could catch it; in the second half, he repeated the charge, only this time lacking any support close by he passed to a Notts player who had to concede putting the ball into touch, but nothing came of the line out that followed. Joe Ajuwa also had one great run starting on the left and moving midfield, but his long high pass to a winger on the right was just too high for a catch on the run, and the slight pause was enough to close up the Nottingham defence before the line was crossed."
Of course we had players out for injuries and some others commentated on the bewildering range of player combinations being fielded leading them to a sense that the constant changing was producing a settled side. I have since then formed the view that Lin has 'method in his madness' and am less disconcerted by the team sheets he produces than others are - but I say this before seeing the sheet for Saturday! We might of course strip our pitchside photographer of his cameras and field him to test the confusion caused by two Dave Jacksons on the pitch. Please not!
15. Alex Davies, 14. Nick Scott, 13. James Lewis, 12. Simon Whatling, 11. Ashley Smith, 10. Gordon Ross* ©, 9. Rob Lewis, 1. Shawn Pittman*, 2. Saul Nelson, 3. Greg Bateman, 4. Adam Brown, 5. Gary Johnson, 6. Lee Beach, 7. Mike Denbee, 8. Ed Jackson.
Replacements: 16. Tom French, 17. Dan George, 18. James Tideswell, 19. Matt Corker, 20. Ben Russell, 21. Jack Moates, 22. Will Hurrell.
15. Edd Thrower, 14. Joe Ajuwa, 13. Hudson Tonga'uiha, 12. Paul Mackey, 11. Liam Gibson, 10. Seb Jewell , 9. Jack Moates, 1. Billy Moss, 2. Vili Ma'asi, 3. Leo Havalatau, 4. Matt Corker, 5. Mike Powell, 6. Martin Purdy, 7. Michael Hills ©, 8. Ed Siggery
1 Matt Parr 2 Joe Duffy 3 Ryan Bower 4 Craig Hammond
5 Nic Rouse 6 Sione Kalamafoni 7 Brent Wilson 8 Filipo Levi
9 Sean Romans 10 James Arlidge 11 Jack Cobden 12 Juan Socino
13 Ayoola Erinle 14 Tim Streather 15 Andrew Savage
Replacements
16 Jimmy Stevens 17 Jonny Harris 18 Ben Prescott 19 Alex Shaw
20 Phil Eggleshaw 21 Finlay Barnham 22 Kieran Hallet.
In Pool C Moseley beat Plymouth 25-17.
And, more importantly, I bet Nottingham don't play in green & white.
Ah me, I've lost my bearings
Conceding a penalty directly from the kick-off seemed - at the time - to be the worst possible start to the second period, but it got worse with the two sin-binnings. Gordon Ross looked seriously miffed about his, and Alex Davies' was decided by the reaction of the Nottingham bench. Yes, he lifted the player off his feet, and we know in the current climate how that's going to end, but their histrionics were unnecessary. However, keeping Nottingham to just three points during the 15+ minutes that we were down to 13/14 men was what swung the game in our favour. That and two converted breakaway tries in two minutes.
A final comment re: Nick Scott, who did something today that I've never seen a London Welsh player do. Chasing a kick ahead he absolutely nailed the Nottingham player as he was getting his clearing kick away, resulting in another player being forced to dot-down behind his own line. For years we've seen our wingers chase the ball but stand off once the defender has gathered instead of putting pressure on and forcing mistakes. Next week - three quarters running straight lines, drawing defenders and making overlaps count.
Never mind, a win's a win, particularly with a bonus point attached.
And Nottingham played in green & white after all; just when I thought my cynicism would be justified!
Great stuff!