Lymm 59
Waterloo 12

Lymm hosted Waterloo in the final pre-season warm up match at Beechwood, before opening their league campaign at home to newly promoted Blackburn on Saturday 7^th September.

Waterloo play in North 1 West, RFU Level 6, the league below Lymm. The match was played over 3 x 30minute sessions and Lymm had a 27 man squad of players. With a number of players still away on holiday or unavailable, the squad comprised only 10 regular 1st XV players from last season. This gave coach and DoR Fletcher a chance to blend in many of last season’s successful Senior Colts and 2nd XV players. A sizeable crowd were not disappointed with the rugby on display.

The first 30 minutes were fairly even and it was 20 minutes before any points were scored. This came from Lymm and last season’s Senior Colt, the impressive George Norman, who took a great line onto a pass and sprinted through the wrong footed defence to score under the posts. Tom Shard converting, (7-0). Waterloo were competing well and responded with an unconverted try 5 minutes later, (7-5).

Within 4 minutes of the second session Waterloo took the lead with a fine worked try, out on the right and an excellent conversion, (7-12). But Lymm were now more settled and after 12 minutes good hands put James Pitcher into space to score with Shard converting, (14-12). Lymm were now dominating the breakdown areas and the pace of their game was impressive. Two further tries from Norman and Tom Baker both converted by Shard saw them go into the final 30 minutes 28 – 12 in front.

In the final 30 minutes, Lymm scored five more tries by James Kimber, Cashel Chilvers, Cormac Nolan, Richard McEvoy and Joe Senior, Shard converting three of them. FT 59 – 12

Newcomer, Prop James Mawdsley, who missed virtually the whole of last season due to injury, impressed, as did locks James Yates and Will Baldwin. Tom Shard only missed two conversions, competing with quite a strong wind and showed his versatility in moving to fly-half when tom Baker came on at 9. An impressive performance from a young squad but the real test is next Saturday.

A big thank you to our referee, Mr Matt Riley, he kept the game flowing, much to the
appreciation of players and spectators.

Coach Fletcher commented. ‘I was pleased with the performance. We got the opportunity to practice our processes and systems against a decent side.

‘We lacked a bit of accuracy in the first 20 minutes but after that I thought we were pretty clinical. It was nice to see a mix of different style tries and scorers from set pieces and open play’.

Squad