Thirds made to sweat for late bonus point win at Belhar

What was immediately clear is that Belhar is a club on the rise and they defend their home ground with passion and pride. During our warm up  we finally got to watch some of the U20’s who were involved in real tussle.

The 3rd team encounter proved to a good contest with some high quality moments from both sides.

Belhar showed brilliant finishing to a stun our Hammies gathering as early as the 1st minute when an early fumble in midfield allowed the Belhar outside backs to chip,chase, collect then offload superbly 2 or even 3 times to beat our last line. It was a great wake up call early on for Hammies The timing of the passing and ruthless finishing from Belhar was impressive.

7 -0 to Belhar and 1 minute played.

Hammies did respond well to the early set back and ran in 2 well worked teams trys. After some poor handling from Hammies it was a more direct approach that brought results with Hugo Swart scoring a fine solo effort and James Language rounding off a good bit of work from the forwards on Belhars line. 10- 10 at half time… coach Gav not impressed with his chargers and rightly so. Way to many handling errors and a lack of urgency in parts of the 1st half.

At scrum time though Hammies really did show up and it was a one way traffic in the scrums until tight head prop Erf got pinged for a high shot and spent most of the last quarter in the bin. It took some time to break the deadlock and we entered the final 10 minutes with things way to close for comfort. This all  before Captain and birthday boy Ranger bust open what was becoming a very tight affair with a barnstormer down field. Ranger then round off that long run in the next passage of play to put some much needed daylight on the score board.

Substitute Wally returned to action this week off the bench and showed his experience to guide the team home through a very sticky contest where Belhar gave as well as they got.

Other stand out performances off the bench from centre Wade Hargreves and scrum half Jonathan Halliday who had his first run on start.

Upfront Hugo Swart continues to make big contributions with his pace and high work rate and has the makings of modern rugby forward in every sense.

Tristian Cramer is also improving with every game with solid defence, line breaks and well timed offloads.

Good finish boys but still much to work on before we see the best of this team.