Sydney Shield
Brothers 28 Cabramatta 22
Mounties 66 Moorebank 0
Glebe 32 Manly 24
St Marys 41 Wenty 12
Ryde Eastwood 50 Hills 20
Cabramatta recovered quite a bit of respect by contesting strongly today, in their first game since Mounties beat them 62-4 four weeks ago. Cabra were actually in front 10 minutes after half time. There have been a number of players oscillating between Cabra and Parramatta Flegg.
Mounties confirmed that it is not a one team competition with the demolition of Moorebank, a larger margin than St Marys 60-10 win against the Rams a few weeks ago. In Round 1, St Marys visited AKR and playing sparkling football, ran in 8 tries in the first 52 minutes to lead 42-6 but Mounties did not give up and reduced the margin to 46-24. Today’s side was strengthened by the inclusion of Tom Menzies, Liv Saukuru, Netane Masima and Nathan Davis, who all started the season in RMC.
Glebe looked they would repeat the Mounties feat of unblemished defence, when they led 32-0 after 55 minutes, but then conceded 4 tries in the space of 10 minutes and were placed under pressure to keep the win.
In arguably the biggest game of the day, St Marys were out of the blocks quickly with 2 tries inside the first 10 minutes, Wenty replied in kind. I cant recall if the score at half time was still 12-12 or perhaps 16-12. Unfortunately, again it has been shown that any system is only as good as the operator, as the clock was turned back to zero for the 2nd half, so all points have been deemed to have been scored in the first half in the system. The same thing happened in the NSW Cup game between Canterbury and Canberra last week, but the operator reopened the system after full time and inserted the correct history.
The updated team lists for the Ryde vs Hills game showed significant variation from those published on Tuesday. Ryde Eastwood decided to drop back 6 players from RMC and Hills decided to promote 5 players from SG Ball. So it was somewhat surprising that Hills led 10-0 after 16 minutes with tries to Logan Aldridge, who may have been the leading try scorer in RMC last season and Sam Curtain, who I presume is the Oztag player who is regarded as the quickest player in that sport. But inevitably, the Hawks got on top and ran in 7 tries in 30 minutes either side of half time, before Hills hit back with a couple of quick tries to close the gap a bit before the Hawks closed out the game. During this game, I believe that Ryan Garner became the first player this season to play the 3 grades – NSW Cup, RMC and SS.
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