Thurrock 27 v 60 Bury St Edmunds
AT the third time of asking, this trip to Essex, for this re-arranged league fixture took place. On a bright and sunny afternoon at Oakfield, the pitches all looked green and sandy. And the pitch was a testament to the hard work of the ground staff. Who had worked very hard all week to allow the game to go ahead. Bury lost the toss and Thurrock elected to play with a slight benefit of the wind 1st half. Nothing went well for the visitors for the first ten minutes, with poor scrummaging and confused line-outs, topped by a breakaway try for Thurrock, Bradleigh Retigan making a break from the base of the scrum and after a 45 metre run was stopped shy of the line but the supporting forwards arrived in time for veteran Lee Herring ton to score, Jake Barrand easily converted taking the home side to a 7 point lead. Bury realised, although 6 positions ahead in this National league, Thurrock supported each other well and our defence need to tighten up.
From the restart, Bury secured the ball and whilst the Thurrock defence re-aligned Radmill scooted over for Burys first try. Thurrock came back strongly and continued to ask a lot of the Bury defence, who believed that players slowly retreated, catching them offside. Penalty for Thurrock with Barrand again putting his kick through the uprights. Bury had the better possession and excellent support runners and angles – Mann crossed the line for a try, converted by Rush. Within a couple of minutes of each other, Garrard and Stone also sped across the line and from a promising start Thurrock found themselves behind, with the half coming to an close, Bury added another couple of try’s, but missed both conversions to lead at the break 32-10 Playing with the slight breeze on their backs, Bury now had better possession and greater purpose, Bixby found himself 20 meters out and nothing in front of him and scored a simple converted try.
Thurrock weren’t going to lie down though and came back with another try this time Reece Durrance on hand to score Then an amazing 15 minute spell of rugby and Bury scored tries from Stone, Davis and Tanimo Samoa with Thurrock adding tries from James Flavin and Earl Gorman with Barrand adding a conversion.
So 10 tries to 4 not a good day for Thurrock although they kept at the job for whole 80 minutes and were in the game for lot of the game but conceding tries in spells left them out of the running.
This week THURROCK visit BARKING in a bottom of the table clash
