Weekend Roundup and Team of the Week

Welcome to the weekend round up and team of the week. This weekends team of the week is the Northampton Saints who scored a remarkable 58-17 victory over Saracens. Full match report is available here. They came back from being 10-0 behind after 8 minutes to put on 46 unanswered points, scoring a remarkable 7 tries, 4 of which went to Sean Lamont. Its been 10 years since a Saints player score 4 tries in one match, and a lot of credit needs to go to Sean for this Herculean effort. It was an excellent time for the Saints to record their first five point win of the season, and now hopefully they can use this as a springboard to climb the league. They currently sit in 7th place, but a win over London Irish next Sunday could see them move ever closer to a top 5 position, which would be even more of an astonishing effort given their poor early season form. On Friday I took the Saints to win by 1-12 points, boy am I glad I got this one wrong.

Sticking with Rugby Union, the Wellington Hurricanes won again(as predicted here on Friday) on Saturday beating the Western Force 29-5. Full match report is available here. This sees them at the top of the Super 14 table after two rounds with a maximum 10 points. They were really fast out of the blocks and were 14-0 up after 5 minutes. What encourages me about this win is that the forwards are scoring tries. Historically the Hurricanes back have been one of the most potent forces in all of the Super12 teams, but they have been let down by the lack of strength in depth of the forwards. With Jerry Collins leading form the front and Rodney So'oialo seemingly in his prime the Hurricanes are starting to show good attacking forward play as well as an extremely well organized defense. With another home game to come against the Cats next week, I really am starting to think the anything less than a semi-final place this year will be a bad season for the Hurricanes.

Onto football and Cambridge United scored their first victory of 2006 by beating Southport 2-1 on Saturday. As usual they did not make it easy for themselves, and instead of going on to dominate the game after scoring they allowed Southport to equalize before Mark Peters played the get out of jail free card to score the winner. The game itself was dire, Cambridge will be kicking themselves for not building on a heavily deflected Rob Wolleaston goal midway through the first half. They were never really troubled by Southport until they started to defend deeper and deeper in the second half. This is a typical ploy of Cambridge, the longer they go on holding to a slender one nil lead the deeper they get and the worse the defending gets. Don't get me wrong the current set of defenders we have are good and what a bonus it was to see Mark Peters back to his best after all the talk at the end of last week about dropping him.

Three points was nice even thought it was not a pretty victory. The game could have got out of hand at the end as once again we decided to take the ball to the corner at every opportunity. I cannot for the life of me understand this, we have already thrown away two points to Forest Green because of this tactic, yet we still persist with it. Rob Newman said that this is what Chelsea do so its good enough for Cambridge United, well it would be if we were as good as Chelsea. It's quite simple they have great players we don't. Throw the ball in the box and go for another goal that will really kill the game off. There were some very angry players making some very dangerous tackles, and this can easily be avoided. The big positive of the game was the front pairing of Bridges and Guy. Rob Newman could do worse than try to secure Guy on loan until the end of the season. If we can move Bridge back to midfield and try him up front alongside Fola we could have a very dangerous frontline. Another big game looms on Tuesday as we travel to Burton where we all hope we can break our away hoodoo.

Finally Rugby League and the Warrington Wolves continue their disastrous start to the season with a 26-20 defeat by Huddersfield. Despite racing to a 10 point lead in the first 8 minutes their defense could not hold out and the score were tied going into half time. Huddersfield went on to press home their advantage with four more second half tries compared to two form the Wolves. This is the worst possible start for Warrington as neither Huddersfield nor Salford were expected to be in the top six of this years Super League. Coach Cullen is really going to have to earn his money if they are to be considered a team capable of making the end of season play offs in October. I realise that they have suffered a number of injuries from last weeks game and that hasn't helped. However Rugby League is a very physical game and that is likely to happen every week, if there is not strength in depth then it will be a very long season for the Wolves. It's very important they bounce back quickly although with Hull, St. Helens, and Wigan their next three game it is hard to see where the first win will come from.