COLIN Stewart, the Head Coach at Teignmouth RFC, “Knew it was going to be tight” when his side visited Newton Abbot in a huge clash at the bottom of the Regional 2 Tribute South West table.
He continued, “Both teams [are] fighting for their life unfortunately down at the wrong end of the table- expected to be tight and attritional for the first half but we were confident if we stuck with it, it would come good at the end.”
On how the game was won, Stewart commented, “When we got down into the red zone, into the 22, we did really well and managed to turn that into some points… We got over the gain-line really well at times and put pressure on Newton Abbot.”
On the flipside, Newton’s Director of Rugby Mike Saxton spoke to the MDA of “Lots of positives” for his side.
There are some young players there who clearly have plenty of potential, Saxton pointing to just a couple of them. “There were some great performances out there, Jed [Griffin] had a great game, Calum Westaway was great and in general all of the players had a good game we just could not find the go-forward to keep on top of everything, keep them pinned in their half.”
It would be easy enough for the All Whites to pick up a doom and gloom mentality but instead, Saxton said: “I think we now have got a team of players who understand where we are as a team, where we are in the league and the games we want to target.”
He continued, “We’ve still got 6 or 7 games we’re targeting as wins, hopefully we’ll get a few surprise wins against the top tier teams. We’ve got a whole half of the season left and we’ve got to play Teignmouth again as well so when we come back we’ll be gunning for them.”