No Danger for 3XV Rangers with Finsbury Park not quite up to the mark

Match Report by Luke Donnebaum

Saturday brought about a certain sense of déjà vu to last weekend with Finsbury Park turning up for this rearranged fixture and declaring only 14 players. Thankfully, the way you could tell this wasn’t just a repeat of the previous week was Weedon Lane’s pitch being beautifully dry and a pleasant sunshine in a bright blue sky.

With the déjà vu continuing come kick off time, the 14 had turned to 13 with a no-show. A quick decision to sacrifice two wingers to even things up gave Finsbury an opportunity to exploit this in the opening exchanges. Credit to Finsbury, they seemed to spot the times where we spread out our defence with forwards filling in the missing backs slots to keep it tight to make yards and then, when committing too many to the rucks, sending the ball out wide quickly. It was this pattern that saw Chiltern fall behind despite arguably showing more in the opening exchanges.

Chiltern rallied as they did the previous week and came back at Finsbury. As Chiltern looked to attack out wide, the ball found its way to stand in skipper, Luke Donnebaum, in the back line. A questionable decision was made to attempt a kick-thru and surprisingly paid dividend with the covering Finsbury defender taking it over the dead ball line for a 5 meter scrum to Chiltern. A pick and go blind saw Luke Donnebaum draw the Finsbury flanker before offloading to Vas Chirita to shimmy his way over the line. Conversion missed.

Finsbury found joy again with a similar pattern of play to before, again scoring by going out wide. Conversion missed.

Chiltern managed to level things up before the end of the half with Ben Daniels coming from the bench to make a big impact on the game, crashing over to score his first of the day on his debut. Conversion missed to make the half time score a tight 10-10.

Turning around for the second half, the belief from Finsbury that they could win this game was audible and this belief was aided even further by an almost immediate score. It was again out wide but, with Finsbury’s missing players having now arrived, this breakthrough was a simple case of missed tackles on our part. With a wind behind them, Finsbury slotted the conversion from out wide to make it 10-17.

Cue Ben Daniels to make his second big impact of the day. Strong running saw him pile over again having gone through several attempted tackles. Unfortunately this was again out wide and resulted in another missed conversion. 15-17.

Chiltern now started playing some attractive, passing rugby. One such move demonstrating great support and offloads saw Jamie Anderson find Johnny Rice out wide on the touchline. Drawing his man, a deft pop inside found Luke Donnebaum following in support. An over the shoulder offload as the next Finsbury drift defender came across saw the ball find its way back to Jamie Anderson. Taking contact, it was Johnny Rice arriving first to pick from the deck and turn to feed the on rushing Harri Doyle who dived over in the corner for another unconverted try. 20-17.

With the game still tightly balanced, Ben Daniels finally made sure to round of a superb debut with a 3rd try. This time managing to run in close to the posts for Jamie Anderson to slot the conversion and leave us a 10 point lead. 27-17. And this is how it remained.

It was a great match in all. Finsbury were a good bunch and not a single incident occurred in a fiercely fought contest. It has to be said that numbers for this weekend were not looking great by Thursday this week but thankfully an influx of Chiltern youngsters due to represent Bucks under 20s the following day were permitted to contribute 40 minutes each and Jamie Anderson’s successful recruitment of 3 of his uni mates who all made very good impressions on their A&C debuts mean't we were able to field side. With roughly 5 or 6 faces in the Finsbury line up looking familiar from those appearing in their 1st XV squad photo on their website, this injection of youth was certainly a welcome blessing to help the 3XV keep their title challenge on course.

Next up is currently 3rd placed Pinner & Grammarians.