Mighty Green Machine 10 – Merseyside Police 19 If the MGM showed their charitable side last week, lending four players to Ruskin Park, this week Benno’s grizzled warriors took their charity work to Live Aid levels to gift wrap a victory for the boys in blue. Sending out a team boasting a significant number of former professional and first team players, and one international, and playing at the MGM’s spiritual home, Fortress Hall Road, on a glorious late summer afternoon, one could have been forgiven for expecting the MGM to post a comfortable victory against an understrength Police side. However, a curiously inept performance saw the MGM take a backwards step from last week’s win to conjure up a loss in spite of dominating most of the game. With a superior scrum and lineout and the lion’s share of possession, a misfiring machine managed to knock on and cough up sufficient ball for a limited Police team to score three long range tries which proved enough to seal victory. Some defeats are easier to take than others. Playing a superior team and dogging your way to respectable defeat is more than acceptable. Heroic even. Missing tackles, turning over ball after ball in contact and generally playing like you expect the cavalry to arrive and save the day is not. And that’s how it was today. The MGM went a try down in the first half, having turned the ball over and seen the Police return it from distance to score and make the conversion. The man of bronze equalised for the machine shortly after, from short range, only for the Police to extend their lead with their number 10 taking advantage of some sloppy defence to score, again from a long way out. Turning round 14 – 5 down, with the promise of the wind in the second half, the MGM did not panic but fully expected to make up the deficit. Surely they could not be as bad as in the first half. In fact, they were worse, and fell further behind to a further long range try following yet another turn over, before Gareth Davies crashed over with ten minutes to go, to close the gap to 19 – 10. There was a slight sense then that the machine could do the necessary to close the gap but it was not to be. Instead a stop-start, scrappy game puttered out into nothingness. The Police had three or four good players and triumphed over an MGM team packed to the gunwales with talent and experience. So two games in, the MGM has played two, won one and lost one. Pray God it doesn’t lose another this season with such a lack of pride and passion. Next week sees the MGM take on old foes Sefton. Hopefully they’ll be on the end of an almighty backlash.
Posted on: Sat, 14 Sep 2013 20:58:45 +0000
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